Destroying RAID Arrays

You create RAID drives, so you should know how to tear them down.

So we built a few RAID arrays and mounted them—now let’s tear them down.

Unmount everything

Make sure you have the arrays unmounted from their normal (or abnormal) paths. If you don’t, much of this will not work as intended.

Check mdstat

Let’s see which arrays we currently have configured.

cat /proc/mdstat

The output should list any arrays you have built and indicate their current state. In this case, we need to know the names of the arrays so that we can remove them.

Remove Arrays

Now let’s stop the arrays.

sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md127  # or whatever was returned above

Once the arrays are stopped, we can zero out the superblocks so the disks are clean.

sudo mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

Trust, but Verify

Rerun cat /proc/mdstat and make sure those arrays are gone.

cat /proc/mdstat