From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Goswin von Brederlow Subject: Re: Building RAID5 w/o a Hot Spare Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:14:06 +0100 Message-ID: <87ockf37i9.fsf@frosties.localdomain> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: In-Reply-To: (Carlos Williams's message of "Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:26:50 -0500") Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Carlos Williams Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Carlos Williams writes: > I am building a Linux system which has 4 identical 'fd' partitions on > each of the 4 drives. I don't want to use the 4th partition or disk if > you would like to call it as a 'hot spare'. I would like to span the > entire array over the 4 drives. My question is does my command look > correct for doing so? > > mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 > /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2 > > I shouldn't have to specify any additional flags in the 'mdadm' > command to make sure it uses all 4 drives as the RAID5 array, right? No, it will use 4 drives as specified. Linux mdadm doesn't get ideas on its own. It does what you tell it to do. :) MfG Goswin PS: sda2 is usualy not the 4th partition on a drive