Am 28.06.2012 13:22, schrieb NeilBrown: >> Do I have to fear read-errors as with RAID5 now? > > If you get a read error, then that block in the new devices cannot > be recovered, so the recovery will abort. But you have nothing to > fear except fear itself :-) Ah, yes. Not exactly raid-specific, but I agree ;-) (we have a poem by Mischa Kaleko in german reflecting this, btw ...) So if there is one non-readable block on the 2 disks I started with (the degraded array) the recovery will fail? As sd[ab]3 were part of the array earlier, would that mean that maybe they bring the missing bit, just in case? >> I still don't fully understand if there are also 2 bits of >> parity-informations available in a degraded RAID6 array on 2 >> disks only. > > In a 4-drive RAID6 like yours, each stripe contains 2 data blocks > and 2 parity blocks (Called 'P' and 'Q'). When two devices are > failed/missing, some stripes will have 2 data blocks and no parity, > some will have both parity blocks and no data (but can of course > compute the data blocks from the parity blocks). Some will have one > of each. > > Does that answer the question? Yes, it does. But ... I still don't fully understand it :-P What I want to understand and know: There is this issue with RAID5: resyncing the array after swapping a failed disk for a new one stresses the old drives, and if there is one read-problem on them the whole array blows up. As far as I read RAID6 protects me against this because of the 2 parity blocks (instead of one) because it is much more unlikely that I can't read both of them, right? Does this apply to only a N-1 degraded RAID6 or also an N-2 degraded array? As far as I understand, it is correct for both cases. - I faced this RAID5-related problem 2 times already (breaking the array ...) and therefore started to use RAID6 for the servers I deploy, mostly using 4 disks, sometimes 6 or 8. If this doesn't really protect things better, I should rethink that, maybe. - Right now my recovery still needs around 80mins to go: md0 : active raid6 sdb3[4](S) sda3[5] sdc3[2] sdd3[3] 3903891200 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/2] [__UU] [================>....] recovery = 83.0% (1621636224/1951945600) finish=81.5min speed=67477K/sec I assume it is OK in this state of things that sdb3 is marked as (S)pare ... Thanks, greetings, Stefan -- 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