RAID5 allows to create an array of N+1 drives where N is the number of drives which will contain real data. The last drive will be used to store parity about the other drives (in practice, the parity information is stored by chunks across all drives and not only on one drive). RAID 5 allows to loose any of the drive without loosing the data thanks to the parity drive, and has a cheaper cost than RAID 1 where the usable data will be N/ instead of N-1.
MDADM is the tool of predilection to build a RAID5 drive. Given 3 disks, the command to build a raid 5 array is :
[code lang=”bash”]mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=5 –raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1[/code]
Problem is, RAID5 drives are not easily splittable/shrinkable/resizable, the operation is complex and must be done offline. The solution is to use LVM on top of MDADM to build a big volume group which will be “protected” by RAID5 allowing to make dynamic paritions on it :
[code lang=”bash”]pvcreate /dev/md0
vgcreate group0 /dev/md0[/code]
And then create multiple, online-resizeable partitions with :
[code lang=”bash”]lvcreate /dev/group0 -n system -L 10G
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/group0-system[/code]
[code lang=”bash”]lvcreate /dev/group0 -n home -L 50G
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/group0-home[/code]
To resize a partition, one can do :
[code lang=”bash”]lvresize /dev/mapper/group0-home -L +10G
resize2fs /dev/mapper/group0-home[/code]
Which will add 10G to the partition, and resize it. It will work even with the system partition, without needing any reboot.