Setting up software RAID on Debian with mdadm

Software RAID has come a long way. Unless you have some very high-rate, high-volume, I/O workloads with SLAs that will otherwise cost you money, for the most part a software RAID will perform just fine. One of the primary benefits of using software RAID is the portability of your disks/data. If a box on which you have a software RAID dies somehow and at least some (depending on your RAID configuration) of drives survive, you can easily resurrect the RAID on another machine without having a duplicate RAID card on hand.

Following is an example of how to setup a RAID 1 array using mdadm on Debian. I have two 2TB drives, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc.

Install mdadm

apt-get install mdadm

Create the array

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Once you create the RAID device, you can check on the mirroring process (Not sure what it is syncing with a blank disk…)

# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sdc[1] sdb[0]
1953382464 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
[>....................] resync = 1.0% (20516736/1953382464) finish=190.1min speed=169401K/sec
bitmap: 15/15 pages [60KB], 65536KB chunk

Create a filesystem

mkfs.xfs /dev/md0

Create a mount point and mount the filesystem

mkdir /data
mount /dev/md0 /data

Ensure that the array is reassembled on boot by adding it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. We do this by scanning the active array and appending it’s details to the config file.

mdadm --detail --scan /dev/md0 >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

Upate the initramfs so that the array will be available on boot

update-initramfs -u

Add an entry to /etc/fstab

/dev/md0 /data               xfs     defaults,nofail,discard  0 0

Do a test reboot and make sure that it is mounted and the data accessible.