From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Dieter Stueken Subject: Re: Partition or whole disk ? Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 18:40:50 +0200 Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <40E2ED12.9020703@conterra.de> References: <1088604941.2840.1.camel@JubJub> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1088604941.2840.1.camel@JubJub> To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Josh Litherland wrote: > Couldn't find an authoritative answer to this in the faq or elsewhere... > Is it preferred to build md sets out of whole disks or of partitions ? > Is there any functional reason why either one is better ? If you make partitions, about one track is is "wasted" to store the useless partition table. Thus I used whole disks for a long time. The problem might be, that "fdisk -l" won't show up if this disk is an MD device. It shows an empty partition table which may look like an unused/empty disk. If you create the partition table, you may waste some data, but fdisk may show this is a disk with a partition containing some MD data on it. Meanwhile I turned back to make partition tables again, just to "tag" the disk as "in use". If I put a new disk into my system, it has no partition table. Thus I can verify this condition, before I initialize the disk. This may prevent me from accidentally initialize/destroying some disk in use, which already has an partition table. Dieter.