From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jonathan Loran Subject: Adding a hot spare to a software raid 5 array Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 14:25:16 -0800 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <3E25DFCC.8080109@loran.name> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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: 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 jonathan@loran.name