Get rid of RAID!

RID. That is RAID without the A. I'll show you how you can experiment with RAID without having multiple drives, which are, not-so-inexpensive actually.



If you don't know what is RAID, a half-an-hour glance through this TLDP guide will get you going. RAID is actually the feature of Linux that helps you append multiple drives (or partitions on different drives) as one device, with different kinds of features. RAID can also mirror your drive data, and protect your data from crashes.

So, to get started using RAID, you need multiple drives. Wait! Is that really true? Do you know about loop devices? That is, devices within devices. Can I fool the RAID by asking it to make an array from loop devices?

The answer is yes! Its possible! Here's a short experiment you can do to believe me!

First, let us create two files, that will act as two devices to RAID.
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=disk0 bs=1M count=256
$ cp disk0 disk1
The first command takes some time. Now you've two zero'd files, ready to be used as loop devices.

Using losetup, we'll setup the loop devices. If you're not already using any loops, you'll get loop0 and loop1 for the two files.
$ sudo losetup -f disk0
$ sudo losetup -f disk1
If they are successful, loop devices have been created. Just to check, you can run
$ sudo losetup /dev/loop0
$ sudo losetup /dev/loop1

Two loop devices ready! Its time to ask RAID to make an array out of them. This is simple, with a self-explanatory command, as
$ sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=raid0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/loop0 /dev/loop1
Take a deep breath, and read that command again. It's actually simple. If you're going along with me, you should see something like this,
mdadm: chunk size defaults to 64K
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.

Great! We've made the RAID array device. Now its time we make it meaningful. Lets format it using ext3 filesystem!
$ sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0
This writes inode tables, superblocks and creates journal. ( If you're just curious, let me explain that the "actual" writing was done on our files disk0 and disk1 )

Now we can just mount this device. Simply type,
$ mkdir myraid
$ sudo mount /dev/md0 myraid
If its successful, try moving inside.
$ cd myraid; ls
You'll see the lost+found folder there. Copy here a few big files to see it works actually. Unmount and mount again. It works!

To see that whether RAID has really done the job, you can
$ df -h | grep md0
/dev/md0 496M 11M 460M 3% /home/kazim/myraid
There we are, a drive with 496M!

Now you can do everything you wanted to do with RAID. For example, try to make the disk1 crash! Since we used raid0 level, a crash means no recovery! If we used raid4 with spare disks, we could even see recovery process going on!

How do you make disk1 'crash' ? Well, you should find a good answer yourself. For data corruption, you can destroy its superblock, or shred it, or do anything bad you can think of! RAID won't recover from a data corruption. But you can simulate hardware crash by using the --set-faulty option of mdadm. (Try crashing a mirror device on a RAID1 with a spare device and see how RAID recovers data.)

Specifically, however, if you try to delete the drives (while md0 running),
$ sudo rm disk0
$ sudo rm disk1
There'll be no data loss. You would ask, "why?". Well, go and revise your OS concepts. And you'll know why 'removing' is not 'crashing'.

Happy RAIDing!