On Tue, July 1, 2008 6:14 am, David Greaves wrote:

Also, if you ever replace a drive there is a distinct chance that the
drive will
be a different size (even if it is the same model).

After being bitten by this I always make partition a few Mb smaller than
the device.

If you are concerned by this (and it is a valid concern) then you can still
use the whole device, and give the --size option to mdadm --create to
tell it to use a little bit less than the whole device.
You give a size in kilobytes (I really should change that to
accept M or G suffixes I guess).

Personally, I prefer to use whole devices.

NeilBrown