mdadm (multiple devices admin) is an extremely useful tool for running RAID systems. It’s is a tool for creating, managing, and monitoring RAID devices using the md driver. It can be used as a replacement for the raidtools, or as a supplement. You can use whole disks (/dev/sdb, /dev/sdc) or individual partitions (/dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1) as a component of an array.
The benefits of using mdadm are:
- mdadm can diagnose, monitor and gather detailed information about your arrays.
- mdadm is a single centralized program and not a collection of disperse programs, so there’s a common syntax for every RAID management command.
- mdadm can perform almost all of its functions without having a configuration file and does not use one by default.
mdadm software tools work for all Linux distributions, with the same syntax.
