Built a new computer with Raid 5, should it take this long to format?

[MageXX9]

Just built a new system with asus G45 motherboard and 5 hard drives. 1 of the hard drives is a 640 GB that I use for the OS and programs, the other 4 are 1 TB each and in a Raid 5. I used the Intel Matrix Storage manager to create the raid array. After it was created I went into windows storage management and it wanted to initialize the drive, I let it use the new GPT to make the partition, and it wanted to format it. I usually choose the quick format, but decided to let it do the normal format. I started it 10/29/08 at around 11:00 PM, in the morning at 8 am it was around 21%, that afternoon around 7 pm it was at 50%, this morning it was at 80%. Should it take this long? I figured since drives are so cheap these days I can backup all my music, dvds, documents, etc. and if I need to format the 640 GB drive nothing will be lost.

Thanks!

 

[Blain]

4 x 1TB HDs can take quite a while.


More if you need it

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a four-drive RAID5, with four 500GB WD SATA HDs, and a RAID initialize step was listing taking 18hours at "10" priority (max). An NTFS full format probably takes nearly as long as well.

 

[Madwand1]

It might have gone faster if you'd enabled the Intel write cache.