Managing RAID on Linux

raidtools

raidtools is the traditional package used to manage software arrays. Although the newer mdadm is more feature-rich, raidtools is in wider use throughout the software RAID community. While it’s a bit more complex to manage arrays using raidtools, the package has proved reliable for many years. raidtools has remained at version 0.90 for several years, but the prerelease for version 1.0 of raidtools became available during the course of this writing, although it has not been officially released yet. The new version has some new utilities, including a tool that allows users to generate /etc/raidtab files by querying an active array, which is very useful if you’ve accidentally deleted your /etc/raidtab file. The additions to version 1.0 are covered in this section, but keep in mind that I used a narrowly released beta version during my testing, and that some functionality might have changed since then.

Version 1.0 fixes several known bugs in the 0.90 release of raidtools. raidtools-20010914 (version 0.90.0), in addition to having some minor bugs, was released without a vital utility, raidsetfaulty.This utility is used to manually induce a disk failure and had been included with previous releases. Instead, raidtools-20010914 shipped with a new program named raidhotgenerateerror, whose name makes it look like a replacement for raidsetfaulty. Unfortunately, raidhotgenerateerror does not perform the same function as raidsetfaulty and should not be used as a replacement. raidhotgenerateerror ...