This is just funny

[LxMxFxD4]

4x2TB Hitachi Raid 5 array.

Full format time of 5,589GB: 4 days

Started 8:30pm last night: 18% completed (17 hours in)

 

[onza]

DAM! What a time sink.

 

[retnuh]

wow that painful..... imagine how long it'll take to rebuild or expand it!

hmmm..... if I did my math right thats 16.4Mb/s. Makes me wonder what kind of verification process format is using or if the raid controller doesn't like sequential writes.

--update--
Did some searching.... and didn't find what I was looking for, mainly a smarter format or command line options that would do write and verify process in larger chunks as I'm not sure what size format uses by default, ie 512 or 4K IOs, where for a 2TB drive 64K+ IOs might perform better. I was thinking if there was some tuning options it might be faster to restart the process. We've always used smaller scsi drives so I haven't had the pleasure of formatting a 6TB raid array.

 

[Nothinman]

wow that painful..... imagine how long it'll take to rebuild or expand it!

hmmm..... if I did my math right thats 16.4Mb/s. Makes me wonder what kind of verification process format is using or if the raid controller doesn't like sequential writes.

--update--
Did some searching.... and didn't find what I was looking for, mainly a smarter format or command line options that would do write and verify process in larger chunks as I'm not sure what size format uses by default, ie 512 or 4K IOs, where for a 2TB drive 64K+ IOs might perform better. I was thinking if there was some tuning options it might be faster to restart the process. We've always used smaller scsi drives so I haven't had the pleasure of formatting a 6TB raid array.

It's most likely doing them in cluster size chunks which would be 4K on volumes up to 16TB, I believe.

 

[LxMxFxD4]

It's most likely doing them in cluster size chunks which would be 4K on volumes up to 16TB, I believe.

Sadly I didn't have 4 days to do this. I cancelled it and did a quick format. Russian Roulette on bad sectors I guess.. but so far so good!

4 days.. man, ridiculous.

As for rebuild times.. I would estimat eabout 24 hours. On my old 900GB (4x300GB raid5) array it would take about 6 hours.

We shall see if I get a drive failure!

 

[Nothinman]

We shall see if I get a drive failure!

Good luck with that. I always run bonnie++ for a few days before trusting any drives with my data.