I have a software raid5 using /dev/sd{a,b,c}4. It's been up for months, through many reboots. I had to do a reboot using sysrq When the box came back up, the raid did not re-assemble. I am not using bitmaps. I believe it comes down to this: <4>md: kicking non-fresh sda4 from array! what does that mean? I also have this: raid5: raid level 5 set md0 active with 2 out of 3 devices, algorithm 2 RAID5 conf printout: --- rd:3 wd:2 fd:1 disk 1, o:1, dev:sdb4 disk 2, o:1, dev:sdc4 mdadm: forcing event count in /dev/sdb4(1) from 327615 upto 327626 Why was /dev/sda4 kicked? Contents of /etc/mdadm.conf: DEVICE /dev/hd*[a-h][0-9] /dev/sd*[a-h][0-9] ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=3 UUID=b4597c3f:ab953cb9:32634717:ca110bfc Current /proc/mdstat: md0 : active raid5 sda4[3] sdb4[1] sdc4[2] 613409664 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [_UU] [==>..................] recovery = 13.1% (40423368/306704832) finish=68.8min speed=64463K/sec 65-70KB/s is about what these drives can do so the rebuild speed is just peachy. -- Jon - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html