From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Carlos Williams Subject: Building RAID5 w/o a Hot Spare Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:26:50 -0500 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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?