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I have two disk I'm clearing up but I forgot whether they were part of a RAID 5 array of 4 disks or a RAID 1 array of 2 disks. Is there any traces I can look at to determine? The RAID would have been a Linux software RAID used by QNAP. The QNAP NAS model is TS-451+. The partitions look like this in the screenshot: enter image description here

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  • BTW both disks are 4GB ones. I'm not sure whether the largest partitions on both disks appear to be the size of 8GB. I'm not confident that it is indication of these being a RAID 1.
    – Max
    Apr 16, 2020 at 13:12
  • I’m not familiar with how QNAP does stuff, but did you try using mdadm to start the supposed array yet? I think it can also scan for arrays.
    – Daniel B
    Apr 16, 2020 at 13:16
  • Thank you for your reply. Does the command work when the drives are mounted from external USB dock? I unfortunately do not have any more bays in my NAS...
    – Max
    Apr 17, 2020 at 15:05

1 Answer 1

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Log on via ssh as admin (uid 0 - as root for QNAP):

# mdadm --examine /dev/sda3

# mdadm --examine /dev/sdb3

(maybe disks on your NAS are different from sda or sdb, but data partition should be the third, based on your screenshot - largest partition)

For each disk you are going to get the RAID type, as similar to:

Raid Level : raid6

As you can find on specification here at paragraph "4.1 Primary RAID Level" (page 13) there is a byte on each partition indicating the type of RAID to which the partition belongs. With mdadm --examine you can read this attribute.

Here mdadm source.

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  • Thank you for your reply. Does the command work when the drives are mounted from external USB dock? I unfortunately do not have any more bays in my NAS...
    – Max
    Apr 17, 2020 at 15:05
  • 1
    It should work always. Of course you need to know device name /dev/...
    – Danilo Schembri
    Apr 17, 2020 at 16:58

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