From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Neil Brown Subject: Re: Spare drive won't spin down Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 16:20:34 +1000 Message-ID: <20100507162034.1370d645@notabene.brown> References: <922812.29139.qm@web31703.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <922812.29139.qm@web31703.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Joe Bryant Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Thu, 6 May 2010 10:49:06 -0700 (PDT) Joe Bryant wrote: > Hello - > > I hope some kind soul is able to help. I have configured a RAID1 array - two mirrored drives, one spare. My understanding is that the spare disk should be allowed to spin down, but it won't. Yes, it should. But as you say, it doesn't. More precisely, it seems to work if you create an array with 1.x metadata (e.g. --metadata=1.0) but not if you use 0.90 (which the default for mdadm before 3.1). It seems I broke it with commit 51d5668cb2e3f in 2.6.31. I'll see about fixing that. > > This box is a fresh build and can be rebuilt if that's necessary to fix > or diagnose the problem. Recreate the array with "--metadata 1.0" or "--metadata 1.2" and it should work better. > > Thanks in advance for any help. Linux software RAID is just terrific - I report this minor issue largely because, as I said, it seems like this is something that is *supposed* to work. > Yes, thanks for reporting it. NeilBrown