The Software-RAID HOWTO
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The Software-RAID HOWTO
Jakob Østergaard
jakob@unthought.net
and Emilio Bueso
bueso@vives.org
v.1.1.1 2010-03-06
This HOWTO is deprecated; the Linux RAID HOWTO is maintained as a wiki by the
linux-raid community at
This HOWTO describes how to use Software RAID under Linux. It
addresses a specific version of the Software RAID layer, namely the
0.90 RAID layer made by Ingo Molnar and others. This is the RAID layer
that is the standard in Linux-2.4, and it is the version that is also
used by Linux-2.2 kernels shipped from some vendors. The 0.90 RAID
support is available as patches to Linux-2.0 and Linux-2.2, and is by
many considered far more stable that the older RAID support already in
those kernels.
1.
Introduction
1.1
Disclaimer
1.2
What is RAID?
1.3
1.4
The RAID levels
1.5
Requirements
2.
Why RAID?
2.1
Device and filesystem support
2.2
Performance
2.3
Swapping on RAID
2.4
Why mdadm?
3.
Devices
3.1
Spare disks
3.2
Faulty disks
4.
Hardware issues
4.1
IDE Configuration
4.2
Hot Swap
5.
RAID setup
5.1
General setup
5.2
Downloading and installing the RAID tools
5.3
Downloading and installing mdadm
5.4
Linear mode
5.5
RAID-0
5.6
RAID-1
5.7
RAID-4
5.8
RAID-5
5.9
The Persistent Superblock
5.10
Chunk sizes
5.11
Options for mke2fs
6.
Detecting, querying and testing
6.1
Detecting a drive failure
6.2
Querying the arrays status
6.3
Simulating a drive failure
6.4
Simulating data corruption
6.5
Monitoring RAID arrays
7.
Tweaking, tuning and troubleshooting
7.1
raid-level
and
raidtab
7.2
Autodetection
7.3
Booting on RAID
7.4
Root filesystem on RAID
7.5
Making the system boot on RAID
7.6
Converting a non-RAID RedHat System to run on Software RAID
7.7
Sharing spare disks between different arrays
7.8
Pitfalls
8.
Reconstruction
8.1
Recovery from a multiple disk failure
9.
Performance
9.1
RAID-0
9.2
RAID-0 with TCQ
9.3
RAID-5
9.4
RAID-10
9.5
Fresh benchmarking tools
10.
Related tools
10.1
RAID resizing and conversion
10.2
Backup
11.
Partitioning RAID / LVM on RAID
11.1
Partitioning RAID devices
11.2
LVM on RAID
12.
Credits
13.
Changelog
13.1
Version 1.1
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