Hi Lawrence,

At present I have no experience with Linux RAID, but I've been contemplating some scenario's (see below) which would give me some idea the flexibility and resilience of Linux based RAID 1 mirroring. I'd be interested to know how well you think Linux RAID would stand up to my testing / abuse ;-)

Setup:
Let's say I have 4 x 32GB USB sticks from different vendors. On each one I create one 31.5GB Ext4 partition with names of "disk_1", "disk_2", ...etc.

Linux RAID 1 is used to mirror the 4 x USB sticks, and some data is written to the mirror-sets. I then remove disk_4 and run as a 4 x member mirror-set with 3 members present and one member missing.

Scenario 1:
Using console terminal commands I remove disk_3 USB stick from the mirror-set and take it to another computer. Can it be mounted and read as single JOBD or must it be mounted as a single unit of a mirror set in order to be read?

Scenario 2:
At the command line I remove disk_3 USB stick from the mirror set. Can I then mount this disk on this same computer as a single JOBD or must it be as a single member of another mirror-set? E.g. So that I could do a network based backup of disk_3 while the other two disks in the mirror-set continue their normal operations.

Scenario 3:
Without using commands to elegantly remove disk_3 from the mirror-set, I just pull out disk_3 USB stick. I continue writing data to the remaining mirror-set. One hour later I plug back in disk_3. Will it auto-magically be joined to the existing mirror-set and updated so it contains current data? ...OR, do I need to enter commands to get it to be rejoined to the existing mirror-set?

Scenario 4:
Without using commands to elegantly remove disk_3 from the mirror-set, I just pull out disk_3 USB stick. I then plug in disk_4 USB stick. Will disk_4 be auto-magically joined to the existing mirror-set and updated? ...OR do I need to enter commands?

thanks, Ian.