I have created a software RAID 1 quite some while ago and it always seemed to work for me. However I am not completely sure that I have configured everything right and do not have the experience to check so I would be very grateful for some advice or just verification that all seems right so far. I am using Linux Fedora 20 (32 bit with plans to upgrade to 64bit) The RAID 1 should consist of two 1TB SATA hard drives. This is the output of mdadm --detail /dev/md0 /dev/md0: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Sun Jan 29 11:25:18 2012 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 976761424 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB) Used Dev Size : 976761424 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Jun 7 10:38:09 2014 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Name : argo:0 (local to host argo) UUID : 1596d0a1:5806e590:c56d0b27:765e3220 Events : 996387 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 0 0 0 removed 1 8 0 1 active sync /dev/sda The RAID is mounted successfully: friedrich@argo:~ ? sudo mount -l | grep md0 /dev/md0 on /mnt/raid type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered) Basically my question are: Why do I only have 1 active device? What does the State removed at bottom mean? Also I noticed some strange error messages that I see on the console on system start and shutdown and always repeating in the background when I switch with Ctrl + Alt + F2: ... ata2: irq_stat 0x00000040 connection status changed ata2: SError: { CommWake DevExch } ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=-32) ata2: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen ata2: irq_stat 0x00000040 connection status changed ata2: SError: { CommWake DevExch } ata2: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4040000 action 0xe frozen ... Are these errors related to the RAID? Something seems wrong with the SATA devices.. All together the system works (I can read and write to the mounted raid) but I always had these strange errors on startup shutdown (probably always in the background). Thx for your help