From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Carlos Williams Subject: Re: Re-arranged Drives in MDADM? Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:02:52 -0500 Message-ID: References: <20100128213924.GA1664@cthulhu.home.robinhill.me.uk> <20100129204051.320d1fa2@notabene> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20100129204051.320d1fa2@notabene> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 4:40 AM, Neil Brown wrote: > Or possibly shut down, physically swap the devices, and the start up again. I noticed when I created the RAID5 array on my Linux server using the mdadm command: mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 --spare-devices=1 /dev/sdd2 The above command create a /etc/mdadm.conf file which showed 2 spare devices because one of the spares was rebuilding as the 3rd member of the RAID5 array. Once the rebuild / sync was complete on /dev/sdc2, it would not longer show as a spare. My question is does the data in /etc/mdadm.conf need to be accurate after the RAID has been created and established? Once the rebuild was complete and all 3 drives were synced, the mdadm.conf file was never updated so I deleted the contents of the file and ran: mdadm -D --scan >> /etc/mdadm.conf I didn't see a real reason to do so but I did it just to be consistent with my system and avoid issues later. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?