From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Steve Cousins Subject: Correct way to create multiple RAID volumes with hot-spare? Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:05:29 -0400 Message-ID: <44EB5579.4020200@maine.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Linux RAID Mailing List List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hi, I have a set of 11 500 GB drives. Currently each has two 250 GB partitions (/dev/sd?1 and /dev/sd?2). I have two RAID6 arrays set up, each with 10 drives and then I wanted the 11th drive to be a hot-spare. When I originally created the array I used mdadm and only specified the use of 10 drives since the 11th one wasn't even a thought at the time (I didn't think I could get an 11th drive in the case). Now I can manually add in the 11th drive partitions into each of the arrays and they show up as a spares but on reboot they aren't part of the set anymore. I have added them into /etc/mdadm.conf and the partition type is set to be Software RAID (fd). Maybe I shouldn't be splitting the drives up into partitions. I did this due to issues with volumes greater than 2TB. Maybe this isn't an issue anymore and I should just rebuild the array from scratch with single partitions. Or should there even be partitions? Should I just use /dev/sd[abcdefghijk] ? On a side note, maybe for another thread, the arrays work great until a reboot (using 'shutdown' or 'reboot' and they seem to be shutting down the md system correctly). Sometimes one or even two (yikes!) partitions in each array go offline and I have to mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdx1 it back in. Do others experience this regularly with RAID6? Is RAID6 not ready for prime time? As for system information, it is (was) a Dual Opteron with CentOS 4.3 (now I'm putting FC5 on it as I write) with a 3Ware 8506-12 SATA RAID card that I am using in JBOD mode so I could do software RAID6. Thanks for your help. Steve -- ______________________________________________________________________ Steve Cousins, Ocean Modeling Group Email: cousins@umit.maine.edu Marine Sciences, 452 Aubert Hall http://rocky.umeoce.maine.edu Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME 04469 Phone: (207) 581-4302