Since I can't seem to find instructions on how to do this (yet)...

I'm going to create a 4-disk RAID10 array using Linux Software RAID and mdadm. The old way is to create individual RAID1 volumes and then stripe a RAID0 volume over the RAID1 arrays. That requires creating extra /dev/mdN nodes which can be confusing to the admin that follows you.

1) Create the /dev/mdN node for the new RAID10 array. In my case, I already have /dev/md0 to /dev/md4 so I'm going to create /dev/md5 (note that "5" appears twice in the command).

# mknod /dev/md5 b 9 5

2) Use fdisk on the (4) drives, create a single primary partition of type "fd" (Linux raid autodetect). Note that I have *nothing* on these brand new drives, so I don't care if it wipes out data.

3) Create the mdadm RAID set using 4 devices and a level of RAID10.

# mdadm --create /dev/md5 -v --raid-devices=4 --chunk=32 --level=raid10 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1

Which will result in the following output:

mdadm: layout defaults to n1
mdadm: size set to 732571904K
mdadm: array /dev/md5 started.

# cat /proc/mdstat

Personalities : [raid1] [raid10]
md5 : active raid10 sdf1[3] sde1[2] sdd1[1] sdc1[0]
1465143808 blocks 32K chunks 2 near-copies [4/4] [UUUU]
[>....................] resync = 0.2% (3058848/1465143808) finish=159.3min speed=152942K/sec

As you can see, we get around 150MB/s from the RAID10 array. The regular RAID1 arrays only have about 75MB/s throughput (same as a single 750GB drive).

A final note. My mdadm.conf file is completely empty on this system. That works well for simple systems, but you'll want to create a configuration file in more complex setups.

Labels: SoftwareRAID