Adding a hot spare to a software raid 5 array

All:

I am new to this list, so apologies for any ignorance, or if this question has already been answered (though I did look through the archives a bit). I have a raid 5 array consisting of 6 disks with no hot spare. Here is the output of /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [raid5]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[0] sdh1[5] sdg1[4] sdf1[3] sde1[2] sdd1[1]

         177718400 blocks level 5, 128k chunk, algorithm 2 [6/6] [UUUUUU]

unused devices: <none>

I recently obtained another identical drive, and want to add it as a hot spare. I have seen on the list the following commands to accomplish this:

raidhotadd /dev/md0 /dev/sdi1

or

mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdi1

Where /dev/sdi1 will be the new drive. Are these the canonical ways to do this?

I get the feeling that mdadm is more stable than raidtools, so I'm trying to move to using just them. I do have backups, but it would sure make me happy not to have to recover 100 GB of data from multiple DLT3xt tapes.

Thanks in advance,

    - Jonathan Loran -  
      (415) 572-1017
    [email protected]