Just built a 4 drive RAID 5 array - How to format for NTFS?

[RaiderJ]

This array took an entire day to build, and now I'm wondering if I also need to do a full format, which will take a long time.

Is a quick format ok, or does the first format on a new drive have to be a full one?

 

[doan]

quick format is fine

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: RaiderJ
This array took an entire day to build, and now I'm wondering if I also need to do a full format, which will take a long time.

Is a quick format ok, or does the first format on a new drive have to be a full one?

It doesn't have to be a full format, but it's often recommended if the drives are brand new, since a 'full' format will mark any bad sectors on the drives as unusable.

If they're not brand-new drives, or you don't care, just do a quick format.

 

[RaiderJ]

I imagine the RAID controller picked up any bad sectors while it was building (that IS what it's doing, right)?

Just did a quick format and copied over 50GB or so. Everything seems ok to me!

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: RaiderJ
I imagine the RAID controller picked up any bad sectors while it was building (that IS what it's doing, right)?

Depends on the controller. If it did a lengthy 'build' process to initialize the array, it probably did the equivalent of a full format. Some controllers don't have to fully format the drives to initialize the array, even with a RAID5 (they just mark all the stripes as 'unused' in some way until the OS writes data to them).

 

[RaiderJ]

The build process took around 25 hours (4x400GB = 1.2TB usable) and I didn't have any "quick build" options, so I'm guessing it handled any bad sectors.

 

[nweaver]

wow, my 1.2TB array only took about 6 hours to initialize

 

[Rilex]

It takes longer when it needs to mark a bunch of bad blocks 😉

 

[RaiderJ]

The array is running on a PIII 550MHz, so that might have slowed things down. Eventually, I'd like to have the array setup in a system that looks like this.

 

[Nothinman]

Just did a quick format and copied over 50GB or so. Everything seems ok to me!

I'd be weary of putting a lot of data on their so fast, I usually run a burn-in for at least 24hrs before trusting a single drive with any data, with that array you've got 4x as much of a chance of failure.

 

[RaiderJ]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Just did a quick format and copied over 50GB or so. Everything seems ok to me!

I'd be weary of putting a lot of data on their so fast, I usually run a burn-in for at least 24hrs before trusting a single drive with any data, with that array you've got 4x as much of a chance of failure.

How would I do a burn-in test? Something like a surface test?

 

[Nothinman]

Personally, i run bonnie++ over and over. Any benchmark that stresses the drives and can run for a long time should do fine.

 

[Jeff7]

What about doing a quick format now, and then just running chkdsk /r later? Won't that wind up accomplishing the same thing?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
What about doing a quick format now, and then just running chkdsk /r later? Won't that wind up accomplishing the same thing?

Sure, but if you have already copied some data to the array and it has bad sectors, your data could be corrupted. The whole point of doing the full format would be to find the bad sectors before you use them.

That said, if your array took hours and hours to initialize, the controller hopefully scanned for any bad sectors while doing the initial build.

 

[RaiderJ]

It's an Intel controller - I couldn't find any info on how it does the scan, but I'm assuming since I didn't have a quick format option, it scanned all the drives while building the array. It sure took long enough, it had better have checked those drives!