long formatting time of RAID 5 array

[guzik]

I put 4 10k/18G U160 drives into RAID5 array. Using 2k server and software RAID. Formatting of the array seems very slow (~5% per hour). Can someone verify if this is normal? Or maybe I should stop the process and look for a problem?

 

[Pariah]

It should take that long. Building a RAID 5 array takes a very long time especially in software. If you lose a drive it will take just as long to rebuild the array. Software RAID 5 is a very bad idea if you plan to write any decent amount of data to the array as performance will be abysmal.

 

[samgau]

I used hardware raid and formatting of the whole array (~5x8gb) took less than 30 mins... i dunno about software raid though...