Creating a RAID 5 array in Ubuntu with MDADM Walkthrough

Software RAID-5 is a cheap and easy way to create a virtual single drive from many to store your files. Software RAID in Linux, via mdadm, offers lots of advanced features that are only normally available on harware RAID controller cards. A big one is the ability to grow the array of disks when you run out of space! Consider also that software RAID can move with you so if you decide to change motherboards or your RAID controller fails it is wont mean the end of the world. This guide details setting up software RAID 5 on Hardy Heron (8.04) Ubuntu using mdadm after you have a running Ubuntu install. It does not cover everything you need to know about RAID and the knowledge in this document is by no means extensive please check out the further reading link for more information at the end of this article. There is an expectation that you have a basic understanding on how to use the command line (terminal) Its recommended that you are at least familiar with it before following this walkthrough. Before we get started, remember that no RAID solution is a viable replacement for regularly backing up your data! If your data is mission critical, make sure its backed either on removable media or on another device. We will cover this in another article. One: Prepare the Disks Open up a terminal window and run:
sudo fdisk -l

This will bring up a list of available disks. I will be using 4, 250gb Hard Disks (sdb1, sdc1, sdd1 and sde1) that I wish to combine into a RAID-5 volume. The disks are all currently unformatted and unpartitioned. We firstly need to format the drives (as ext3) and set the RAID flag. This can be easily achieved with gPartEd. If you do not have Partition Editor on your System>Administration menu, install it with this command:
sudo apt-get install gparted

In the Partition Editor application, select each disk in turn and format it to ext3. CAUTION! you will lose all data on the device you format. Once the format is complete, right click on each new volume you have created and select Manage Flags tick the RAID flag to indicate the disk will become part of a RAID set. Once you have your three disks set up, running fdisk -l (as root) should now indicate that those disks are correctly prepared to be created into the RAID 5 array. Two: Creating the RAID Device If you dont already have mdadm (Mirrored Device Admin) installed, run the following:
sudo apt-get install mdadm

You can now create your RAID volume (md0, if this is to be your first) by running:
sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /sde1

To further explain, --verbose will display more information on the screen as the RAID is created (which is useful in case of problems), /dev/md0 is the RAID device to be created, --level=5 dictates that we want to create a RAID 5 volume, and -raid-devices=4 dictates that there are to be four drives in our raid array. Following this is a list of the disks you wish to assign to the array. For more information, you can run: mdadm --help-options When mdadm --create is run, your RAID device will be created Once the build is under-way, you can monitor its progress by running:
sudo watch cat /proc/mdstat

This command will display the status of mdadm, and refresh every 2 seconds. When you are done watching, you can press CTRL+C to escape back to the command line, or you can simply close the terminal window. Read More