[MLUG] More praise for Linux software RAID

[Nick Nobody]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Linux software RAID is
awesome!

A few weeks ago I had a disk die in my NAS (1 of 3 1.5TB Seagate
drives). No problem, mdadm emailed me saying the RAID5 array was
degraded so I picked up a new disk (Western Digital this time) and
within a few hours the array was re-synced and running at full speed.

I RMA'd the dead disk and got the replacement back last week. Over the
weekend I added it to the array and used mdadm's "grow" feature to get
access to the extra 1.5TB of space. A little over 2 days later it was
done growing the array without any issues.

The coolest part of this story is that all throughout this process the
filesystem on the array was mounted and useable (albeit a tad slow).

nick