Last week I finally bought a second HDD for my home directory so I could have some redundancy in case a drive fails. Lucky for me, I had the foresight to put the single drive I had been using on a RAID1 array all by its lonesome self way back when. After installing my new HDD, I found myself tasked with adding to the array. Simple, right? Yes, but with one caveat.
After installing and partitioning the drive properly, add it to the array with:
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mdadm --add /dev/mdX /dev/sdXX
Since the array was only set up to have one drive, the new drive will get added as a spare. Check /proc/mdstat to confirm this…
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md4: active raid1 sdb1[1](S) sda1[0]
1953512312 blocks super 1.2[1/1][U]
This isn’t what I want! Well, here’s the catch: there’s one more (very simple) step; grow the array to the new number of drives.
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mdadm --grow /dev/mdX --raid-devices=Y
…where Y is the new number of drives. And now, to check /proc/mdstat:
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md4 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
1953512312 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_]
[>....................] recovery = 2.1% (41879104/1953512312) finish=516.9min speed=61630K/sec
Perfect! The new drive is on equal playing field with the existing drive and is being brought up to speed with the data on the existing drive.
Ahh, data redundancy. :)