Why aren mirrored RAID pairs identical in size?
Our observations indicate that the installer for Mandrake Linux 10 and 10.1 partitions disks erratically when software RAID is in use. After installation is completed, use the “df” and “fdisk -l” commands to display the partition sizes. One of the two partitions of a mirrored pair (as listed by “fdisk -l”) might be too big, thus wasting some disk space. However, the filesystem itself (as listed by “df”) will usually have the desired size. Other than some waste of disk space, we have not noticed any adverse effects.