[mikeloeven]

i am knew to the whole raid thing but i was shocked to see that the initial build of a raid5 array with 3 2tb drives would take 40+ hours to complete. i may sound like a total noob but these drives are brand new uninitialized unformated disks wouldn't building the raid set be a quick process especially since there is no data to move around ??? after all windows can perform a lightning fast quick format on any size drive why cant you do the same with raids?

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Hello,

What is the hardware you are using? 40+ hours does sound a bit excessive.

Mind you 3x 2TB drives is a huge array!

[Troy]

Hello,

What is the hardware you are using? 40+ hours does sound a bit excessive.

Mind you 3x 2TB drives is a huge array!

[Digerati]

these drives are brand new uninitialized unformated disks

You say that as if that should make the process faster. To me, trying to build a RAID array with unformatted disks is (1) surprising it would let you use unformatted disks and (2) not surprising it would take a very long time.

The array does not care if the drive's clusters have saved data, or random 1s and 0s. It is going to attempt to sync each byte of those 2Tb drives, regardless. Not sure how long is normal, but last time I built a RAID (RAID1) using 2 x 500Mb drives, I don't know how long exactly it took, but it was overnight.

[mikeloeven]

btw because of some technical limitations i had to build the array with two raid5's splitting the drives down the middle and than spanning them back together in disk management. (thatdamn size limit) will that destroy the redundancy or will the array still be able to survive loosing a disk??

though there should be an option to create the raid as a dynamic disk to begin with at the firmware level.

but in responce to troy i am using a sil 3132 chipset with a 3726 port multiplier enclosure
the system is managed by silicon images sataraid5 gui


the sad thing is i download so many 1080P tv shows and anime that i think the drive will fill up rather quickly

Edited by mikeloeven, 27 April 2011 - 07:00 AM.

[Digerati]

will that destroy the redundancy or will the array still be able to survive loosing a disk??

Probably a question you should ask of your RAID controller maker. Or, you can always pull the plug on a drive and see what happens. Nothing like a real test to see if it works. If it doesn't, then what good is the RAID? It just wastes disk space. It is like a backup program. No one ever tests to see if the backup will fully recover them - or how to do it.