Mdadm droped a drive in RAID5. Wont rebuild

[MrMakealotofsmoke]

So at this point im an extremely worried about my array as i need them 4TB of data on it.

So here's the story:

Server was running all good but the memory usage was high from a memory leak in java. So i restarted the server. One of the hard drives decided to change drive letters so i had to re-add it to the raid5 array and rebuild it. All good. Log into the server again and it says one of the other drives in the array has been dropped. Odd? SMART says its fine and its still in linux working fine. Array goes down as it now has 2 dropped drives. Im not sure if it finished rebuilding or not as i wasnt really keeping an eye on it for 30hours.

So now i have a RAID5 array with 2 removed drives and 2 spare drives that is for some reason saying it is the wrong size and wont rebuild.

Details:

MDADM RAID5 with an LVM ontop on it.

RAID5 consists of 4 1.5tb drives. = 4.5TB

For some reason it is reporting as 5.76TB or so and i dont know why.

mdadm.conf:

RAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 metadata=00.90 UUID=44fc3622:cf99fe69:5d53fc14:f3cbdc1c devices=/dev/sde1,/dev/sdg1,/dev/sdh1,/dev/sdi1

(i changed it to match the correct drive letter and rebooted the server but still no dice.


/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
RRAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=44fc3622:cf99fe69:5d53fc14:f3cbdc1c


All drives are working and none of them are faulty.

Please help

[MrMakealotofsmoke]

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 0 0 0 removed
1 8 113 1 active sync /dev/sdh1
2 8 129 2 active sync /dev/sdi1
3 0 0 3 removed

4 8 65 - spare /dev/sde1
5 8 97 - spare /dev/sdg1

[coopstah13]

wait, raid5 only has one parity disk, meaning you can lose 1 disk and the raid can rebuild itself, if you had 4 disks set up and 4.5 tb available you were using raid5 as usual 3x1.5tb = 4.5tb, but if you lost a 2nd disk you're hosed, raid6 uses 2 parity disks and means you can lose 2 disks without losing data. if you had 2 spares, you would only have 3tb available

[MrMakealotofsmoke]

yeah it should be 4.5tb and it was for months before this happened.

I dont see why a dropped drive counts as needing to be rebuilt from. Its not like it has lost any data from it

[coopstah13]

because the extra drive in raid5 is for parity, the whole point is if a single drive fails you can recover the raid set

if you lose 2 drives in a raid5 you lose the data, you have to rebuild the raid after a drive is dropped before another drive is dropped