2010/1/27 Michał Sawicz <michal@xxxxxxxxxx>: > I'm not sure I understand what you want to achieve. A 'spare' disk is > one that isn't used until any of the other fail, then the spare replaces > the failed one. The term 'hot spare' is used to identify a disk that is > a mirror of one of the other drives, but there's no support for that in > Linux Software-RAID. I am sorry because I think I was using the wrong terminology then. I want to use all 4 disks to be an active member or the RAID5 /dev/md0. I wanted to make sure the command I posted in my original post was not going to use 3 partitions for active members of RAID5 on /dev/md0 and use the 4th drive as a 'spare device' in case one of the three drives fail. I don't want that. I just want 4 active / working devices for /dev/md0. >> mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 >> /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2 > > This will create a RAID5 array of 4 devices, yes. Capacity will be 3 x > sd?2. Failure of any one of those disks will not harm the data. OK. I think that answers my questions. Thanks for your help! -- 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
