On Monday April 8, soul@lamp-post.net wrote: > Can you share 2 or 3 'spare-disks' between multiple raid sets? > > Eg. I have a 22 disk array chopped into multiple 4 disk raid-5 volumes, this > leaves me with 2 disks left over.. Can I assign these two drives as floating > spares incase of failure.. this will obviously be a 'first come first serve' > scenario for raid failure.. but its better then not using them. The kernel driver doesn't directly support this. However "mdadm" does. Get mdadm from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/source/mdadm/ compile, and read the doco. You describe your arrays in /etc/mdadm.conf and mention that they are both in the same "spare-group", and then run "mdadm --monitor". This periodically polls the arrays, emails you when there are failures, and will move spares between arrays if needed. NeilBrown /etc/mdadm.conf: DEVICES /dev/disc/*/* array /dev/md/0 uuid=whatever spare-group=A array /dev/md/1 uuid=somethingelse spare-group=A You only need "uuid=" if you want to use mdadm to assemble your arrays aswell. NeilBrown - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
