Yeah, about that :-)

So with the old 1TB drives, I partitioned first and then made the arrays for exactly that reason. My /boot and / partitions are RAID1.

With this new build, I want to use one of those disks as a system drive (I like your idea of switching to a SSD for the OS), and decommission the other two, using them as offline backups of the system drive.

How can I switch from a RAID1 md device, to a regular partition? Or, should I just fail the two other drives in the array and let it stay a RAID1 md device with just 1 drive in it? Can I clobber it and change the partition type of those partitions to regular filesystem partitions and NOT damage the big RAID5 partition?

Thanks again for the help!

Jim