On 05/22/2011 10:57 PM, Tobias McNulty wrote: > Case in point: I have 4 of these 2TB Green drives in a RAID5 array. I > assembled them from the raw devices (no partition table) without any > special precautions. Am I in trouble? The array seems to be working > fine... No, you aren't. If you don't create a partition table in the first place, there's no possibility for partition boundaries to be mis-aligned in regard to the physical sector or erase block size of the underlying blockdevice. You could probably still get it wrong if you chose (if that's even possible, I don't know for sure off-hand) a very weird non-power-of-two chunk size that happens to interfere with the sector size of your disks in a bad way, but since md's default chunk sizes are rather large powers of two, you'd have to put some effort into screwing up (if that is at all possible, as I mentioned before) ;) -- with best regards: - Johannes Truschnigg ( johannes@truschnigg.info ) www: http://johannes.truschnigg.info/ phone: +43 650 2 133337 xmpp: johannes@truschnigg.info Please do not bother me with HTML-eMail or attachments. Thank you.