Working with Software RAID
The raidtools package, also maintained by Ingo Molnar, provides a set of utilities for creating and managing software arrays. raidtools has been the standard software RAID management package for Linux since the inception of the software RAID driver. Over the years, raidtools has proven cumbersome to use, mostly because it relies on a configuration file (/etc/raidtab) that is difficult to maintain, and partly because its features are limited. In August 2001, Neil Brown released an alternative. His mdadm package provides a simple, yet robust way to manage software arrays. mdadm is now at version 1.0.1 and has proven quite stable after its first year of development. It has received a positive response on the Linux-raid mailing list and will likely become widespread in the future. The rest of this chapter will provide you with examples of building and managing arrays, using the raidtools package, as well as mdadm.
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