On Mon, 6 May 2002, mousebusiness.com wrote: > I will be building a RAID5 array with 5 data drives and one hot spare. I > need to use the drive for hot spare for something else at the moment. Is it > possible to build my array with 5 drives and add hot spare later by simply > adding the entry for it in /etc/raidtab? Just create a 5-disk RAID-5 without a hot spare. When you're ready to bring the spare disk into the array just use raidhotadd to insert it. # raidhotadd /dev/md0 /dev/<sparedevice> Now <sparedevice> is a spare disk in /dev/md0 (the 5-disk RAID-5). Now update /etc/raidtab to reflect the new config. That means you'll add nr-spare-disks and a device/spare-disk entry for /dev/<sparedevice>. You can raidstop and raidstart the array to make sure it works, if it makes you feel better, but you shouldn't need to. > The array will be built with 6 drives connected to 3 IDE controllers, one > per channel, 2 channels on each board. If one controller fails, obviously > the array will go down with it. Does that mean that all data will be > irrecoverably lost or will things go back to normal after I replace > defective controller and let the array resync? You'll be able to recover from a controller failure by replacing the failed controller. Since physical controller placement typically impacts device names you want to make sure you put a new controller in the same slot as the one the failed, or make sure you have mapped out the disk order and changed /etc/raidtab to reflect any changes. --- Derek Vadala, derek@cynicism.com, http://www.cynicism.com/~derek - 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
