Hi
I would like to create a raid 5 array with 3 devices : 2 drives (lets says d1 and d2) and 1 logical raid 0 drive stripping some smaller drives (d3, d4 .. dn ) . But ATM the smaller drives are not availables and contain data. So i 'd like to create a raid 5 initially degraded with d1 and d2, copy my data to the array, prepare the raid0 with d3 d4 .. dn and finally add the raid 0 to the raid 5 to complete it

If I create my initial raid 5 with only 2 disk ( mdadm -C /dev/md0 -n 2 -l 5 ) i only have the disk space of 1 disk like raid 1.
So is there a way to initially create a degrated raid 5 ?
thx

just use the word "missing" in place of one of the block device references and keep -n at 3, should work fine.

Indeed it's well explained in the mdadm man page ;p
Thank for tips