I like Linux and I like never running out of hard drive space. Naturally, mdadm and I are best friends.
First, make sure you have what I’ll be using in this post installed.
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sudo apt-get install mdadm parted |
We only use big boy drives anymore, so stop wasting time with fdisk. It’s time to start using parted for all your drive partitioning needs.
Replace sdb with your drive in the following snippets. Run these commands for all the drives you’ll want in your RAID.
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sudo parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt sudo parted -s -- /dev/sdb unit TB mkpart primary 0 -1 sudo parted -s /dev/sdb set 1 raid on |
Your drives are now ready for use by mdadm, so create the RAID! Obviously alter the following for your drives.
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sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 |
Monitor mdadm’s progress!
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watch -n 2 cat /proc/mdstat |
Once that’s done, we can create a file system on top of the RAID.
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sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0 |
And once the file system creation is complete, you can mount your RAID!
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sudo mount /dev/md0 /mnt df -h |
You should see your new RAID’s space. Now enjoy not running out of disk space!