For ldrrp’s setup he followed an online guide by DigitalOcean to setup raid. He has a RAID 5 mounted to /lochnas and another raid 5 mounted to /lochnas/home/plex

Maave also set up RAID 5 but had issues with the DigitalOcean guide - he needed to use partitions for RAID to persist. Here are the command examples. His RAID drives are A B and D.

Use a disk utility to create partitions and mark the drive for RAID auto-detect. Partition type fd00 is the magic hex code for RAID auto-detect

# make a GPT partition and mark as RAID.
# Check partitions ('p' command) before writing ('w' command)
# Repeat for each RAID drive.
gdisk /dev/sda
    n
    {enter}
    {enter}
    {enter}
    fd00
    p
    w
    y

Then you can create the RAID array

# create the raid array, using parition #1 that I just created with gdisk
mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdd1

cat /proc/mdstat
#repeat this command and wait for 100%. It may take hours.

# verify the RAID array
# /dev/md0 (or whatever) should exist
mdadm --detail --scan

# save array. Check your location of "mdadm.conf" for your Linux distro
mdadm --detail --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
update-initramfs -u

Now you can make a partition on and use it

# make partition
mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/md0
# mount this manually if you want to check it

Mount partition #

This will work with any existing raid for a migration as well. Locate your RAID with mdadm --detail --scan and appemd the lines to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf like the instructions above.

Set the partition to mount on boot. Use nano or vi to add the following line to /etc/fstab

nano /etc/fstab

/dev/md0 /lochnas/home ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0

Make your LochNAS home directory and mount

mkdir -p /lochnas/home
mount -a

# verify
df -h -x devtmpfs -x tmpfs