I created a Raid5 array during instalation using 3 8TB devices and set it to /home. To be completelly honest I didn’t pay attention to the size of it and after the instalation I got the following info when running mdadm --detail:
/dev/md127:
Version : 1.2
Creation Time : Tue Jun 18 12:16:26 2024
Raid Level : raid5
Array Size : 7814023168 (7.28 TiB 8.00 TB)
Used Dev Size : 3907011584 (3.64 TiB 4.00 TB)
Raid Devices : 3
Total Devices : 3
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Intent Bitmap : Internal
Update Time : Fri Jun 21 10:05:30 2024
State : clean
Active Devices : 3
Name : localhost.localdomain:home
UUID : cc0b3fcb:32f59208:89283bf9:d43e0ea9
Events : 3919
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1
1 8 33 1 active sync /dev/sdc1
3 8 49 2 active sync /dev/sdd1
I’ve tried mdadm --grow /dev/md127 -z max but the size remained unchanged.
What am I doing wrong? Wasn’t the expected size to be around 16TB?
Lacking a reply from the OP, and curious, so in search of more information, i found this web page centos - raid10 in mdadm reports incorrect "Used Dev Size" - Server Fault which states that “all of the devices has to be the same size. If they are not, then whatever device is smallest is used as the baseline. Used Dev Size is that number.”
This suggests that the original post, stating all drives are 8 TB, is likely incorrect statement?
More likely three 4 TB drives, right?
(one of which would be used for the RAID5 parity, so 8 TB available in the array).
If OP were incorrect about having three 8 TB drives, all it would take is for one of those drives to be 4 TB and the RAID would function as if all the drives were 4 TB.
I configured the raid volume at instalation and failed to see that it defaults to the size of the smallest drive (in this case 8TB) and you have to manually resize it. I had to offline and resize the partition of each disk and then resize the array. I’ll make a detailed step by step as soon as I get to the office on monday (it’s saturday night down here).
Just for clarification, for anyone who visits this thread in the future,
you wrote that “defaults to the size of the smallest drive (in this case 8TB)”
but then show 4000GB (4TB) in your resizing details,
so I think you meant that the smallest was 4TB and you made 8TB to fix the problem?