SOFTRAID LINUX SOFTWARE

A 'stop' followed by an 'assemble' can never do any harm, and may well fix the problem. Problems at boot often leave you with a partially assembled array that then refuses to do anything. If an array fails to start after a crash or reboot and you can't get it to assemble, always try an 'mdadm /dev/mdN -stop', and then try to assemble it again. The simplest things are sometimes the best. It is the single most effective way of turning a simple recovery exercise into a major forensic problem - it may not be quite as effective as 'dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda', but it's pretty close. In particular NEVER NEVER NEVER use 'mdadm -create' on an already-existing array unless you are being guided by an expert. In fact, NEARLY ALL data lost as reported to the raid mailing list, is down to user error while attempting to recover a failed array.

RAID is very good at protecting your data. Also all the performance data is 2011 vintage, so that has been relegated to the archaeology section too. The 2016 rewrite is not covering LVM (at the moment) so for LVM you will find all the old stuff in the archaeology section.

Choosing your hardware, and what is a device?.

What is RAID and why should you want it?.

There are, however, a lot of holes in the information available, any help you can give to the editor(s) would be gratefully received - offers of articles, case studies of raid implementations that aren't covered at present, hardware to practice on to avoid corrupting live systems, etc etc. Please read the editing guidelines.ДЄs of June 2018, the main site is pretty up-to-date. Please contact Wol, Keld or Nick if you want to help. Keld Simonsen updated a lot of the information, and made good ratings for Google.ДЄs of September 2016 Wol is updating it to mdadm 3.3 and the 4.x kernels (mdadm 4.0 was released in January 2017).

But life moved on and having tried to provide up-to-date info, the info became out of date again. This site was created by David Greaves and Nick Yeates. sig's, as this may well say 'I read the list - please do not cc me'.)ДЄnd please use an email client that threads correctly! Replies should be in-line or at the bottom. You should use 'reply to all' unless explicitly requested. Linux RAID issues are discussed in the linux-raid mailing list to be found at The problem is that replacing a drive may be impossible when one fails! Pretty much all these drives are shingled and are completely unsuitable for raidД«e warned that array creation and use may work fine. Some of the information on these pages are unfortunately quite old, but we are in the process of updating the info (aren't we always.)Дo NOT use post-2019 WD Red drives in an arrayД®qually, do not use post-2020 desktop drives in an arrayДЇor the reason, read the section on Timeout Mismatch Where possible, information should be tagged with the minimum kernel/software version required to use the feature.

SOFTRAID LINUX SOFTWARE

It should replace many of the unmaintained and out-of-date documents out there such as the Software RAID HOWTO and the Linux RAID FAQ.

This site is the Linux-raid kernel list community-managed reference for Linux software RAID as implemented in recent version 4 kernels and earlier.

Softraid linux