20 TB RAID 6 System Using Fractal Design's Define XL R2 and Western Digital's Red 4 TB Drives
Real Life RAID System for Today's Small Business
Published on by nick
I reported earlier this month a proof of concept for building software RAID using Ubuntu 12.04. This stepped through the basics of software RAID using Ubuntu. It also followed a video that used the installation disk software to configure the array.
The system I will describe here is based on the article I wrote, linked above. The hardware I used is cited there. But this time, instead of using mdadm in the installation pathway, I used it as a command line tool in the terminal.
The article describing this process can be found here and is very good. I've used the How To Geeks for many projects and they didn't let me down this time either. I followed the procedure pretty closely with some exceptions that I'll describe herein.
Firstly, because I am using 7 x 4 TB disks, and I won't be booting from these disks, I didn't partition them in advance. In a RAID 0, 1 or 1+0/0+1 scenario, I could imagine needing to do this, but in my case I did not. This actually made the process a bit easier, as I simply issued this command:
sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --chunk=256 --level=6 --raid-devices=7 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /dev/sdh --verbose
Notice that I didn't include sda; that's because this disk was already used and formated to ext4 for the main OS, Ubuntu 12.04. It's running a 3 TB Western Digital Green drive.The process of synchronization can take a while and can be viewed with this command:
watch -d cat /proc/mdstat
The configuration file doesn't necessarily have to be created, so check yours at /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf. This file will need to be created if not present. See original procedure for instructions on how to do this.
The next step is to build the file system. Because I wanted a stable, large partition I opted to use the popular XFS file system. This file system can handle larger volumes and is more reliable at this point than ext4 with this size. Creating file system is as easy as this:
sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/md0
After this, simply mount your file system whereever you'd like. I usually choose somewhere in the /mnt path and I add this to fstab:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
Then edit by adding this line:
/dev/md0 /mnt/raid6 xfs defaults 1 2
Overall, this build worked out extremely well, and I experienced not hiccups. The synchronization will take a while but since I can start using my array right away, this is something I don't mind waiting for.
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