@unomagan Hello again.
OK, I get it now cheers; yes we don’t really support mdraid features in the Web-UI and as such there are no facilities to administer them; such as create, delete etc. So currently mdraid members are labelled with the ‘i’ icon explaining their role in the system. No delete option is provided as given they are currently outside of the Rockstor realm I, at the time, thought it best we simply label them and leave well alone. The mdraid recognition itself was added as a stop gap to accommodate certain requirements that were as yet not met by btrfs. The hope is that later we can adopt the btrfs way throughout but as it doesn’t yet exist and there was an interest in mdraid on the system disk we needed to at least acknowledge these drives member status. Prior to that change the cog was offered on these devices as usual and users were given no indication that they were serving as backing devices to md devices; obviously this was less desirable than where we are now as those not aware of their significance could accidentally delete them. There is a documentation issue opened as a result of the thread you sighted that addresses this deleting raid members issue:
And a link here to the issue opened as a result of that thread:
Hope that helps with a little context on where we are on this one. There is obviously room for improvement here but by keeping Rockstor predominantly focused on btrfs for it’s data drives we greatly simplify it’s user experience and UI consistency but we also needed to at least accommodate this very basic level of mdraid support.
My understanding of Rockstor’s current direction is to not become “everything and the kitchen sink” as this role is already well fulfilled by a number of other NAS solutions and I at least think that, as a consequence, Rockstor has a significantly simpler user experience. But there are of course ongoing efforts to extend it’s capabilities so it may well be that this failure to offer mdraid member re-assignment (delete option) gets some attention as time goes on. I’m hoping that the next testing channel cycle of updates should see some enhancements in disk management ‘under the hood’ and they may well help with later adding a tad more basic support for mdraid arrangements such as may address this ‘no delete for mdraid member’ situation. I personally would rather see more user feedback on what mdraid member belongs to what md device prior to adding a delete option for members and this does currently have an outstanding issue:
Other contributors to Rockstor may of course disagree with my sentiments in this area though.