How TO - Linux RAID

In Linux you can use raid, redundant array of inexpensive drives, then if a hard drive fails your data is safe. Okay the fun part begins when you try to enable raid, the obvious choices are raid 1 (mirroring your data) or raid 5 (that uses part of your drives as parity protecting your data uses less space but requires a minimum of 3 drives to work). I won’t bore you with the technical details I will just show a small sample of the commands to create a raid 1, a mirror image of one drive onto a second drive.


You have two devices of approximately same size, and you want the two to be mirrors of each other. Eventually you have more devices, which you want to keep as stand-by spare-disks, that will automatically become a part of the mirror if one of the active devices break.

Set up the /etc/raidtab file like this:

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 1
nr-raid-disks 2
nr-spare-disks 0
persistent-superblock 1
device /dev/sdb6
raid-disk 0
device /dev/sdc5
raid-disk 1

If you have spare disks, you can add them to the end of the device specification like

device /dev/sdd5
spare-disk 0

Remember to set the nr-spare-disks entry correspondingly.

Ok, now we're all set to start initializing the RAID. The mirror must be constructed, eg. the contents (however unimportant now, since the device is still not formatted) of the two devices must be synchronized.

Issue the

mkraid /dev/md0

command to begin the mirror initialization.

Check out the /proc/mdstat file. It should tell you that the /dev/md0 device has been started, that the mirror is being reconstructed, and an ETA of the completion of the reconstruction.

Reconstruction is done using idle I/O bandwidth. So, your system should still be fairly responsive, although your disk LEDs should be glowing nicely.

The reconstruction process is transparent, so you can actually use the device even though the mirror is currently under reconstruction.

Try formatting the device, while the reconstruction is running. It will work. Also you can mount it and use it while reconstruction is running. Of Course, if the wrong disk breaks while the reconstruction is running, you're out of luck.

Thanks to these articles i ii