raid 5 software under win2k3 question

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

just set up a raid 5 across 9 250 gb hd's. It's currently resynching the drives. It's been goin for at least 8 hours and says it's only 2% done, is it really gunna take 20 days to synch up the raid?

thank you in advance.

-Michael

Wstinkbait · Feb 19, 2006

Yea, it could. Check your priority (or % of CPU) setting. Takes me about 32 hours to do 4/200G drives on first build. After that I schedule it to run daily and only takes a few min.

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

aw, is it just cpu usage? 'cause the amd xp 1700 in the machine is running only on a 100 mhz fsb, so it might be worth it to me to take it out 'n set it to the 133 so it goes faster...

Wstinkbait · Feb 19, 2006

Well, Yea a little. 33 mhz wont make that much difference. Might as well let it run now that it's started. The priority setting is just so you can run it in the background while still using the computer. If your not going to use it set it high. Also don't turn it off until it's finished or it may crash a disk. What card are you using?

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

well it's 1.1 ghz to 1.46 ghz, so it's a bit more than 33 mhz... 'n it's just 3 ide controllers installed 'n than a full software raid 5 across them all

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

btw what exactly does is "resynching"? is it the building of the parity?

Wstinkbait · Feb 19, 2006

Well that, and striping the data sectors across all the drives with some redundancy. So if you loose a drive, the data will still be in tact somewhere. This often happens without your knowledge unless you have some sort of alarm set to tell you.

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

under the computer mangement it lists a tab labeled "overhead" and says theres 11% overhead for the raid, what is that?

bchur83 · Feb 19, 2006

It means that one of your drives space is used as overrhead for the parity calculations. Even though it is spread across them all, it amounts to an unusable space equal to one drive.

MLMIB · Feb 19, 2006

oh, I though it was something on top of the parity drive, thats cool

MLMIB · Mar 23, 2006

ok, question again, it took 16 days to build the raid, fine, start copying stuff to it, takes long, but w/e, now it spiked to 100% 'n I thought it was a service that hung, so I reboot. now it's rebuilding the entire raid......um, yea, why?

so this leads to a few other questions.

1) is the resyncing multithreaded unders windows

b) how about under linux

2) what causes it to start resynching from scratch?

Joeteck · Mar 23, 2006

MLMIB said:
just set up a raid 5 across 9 250 gb hd's. It's currently resynching the drives. It's been goin for at least 8 hours and says it's only 2% done, is it really gunna take 20 days to synch up the raid?

thank you in advance.

-Michael

Man, that system is going to run Sloooooooooooow.

(9) 250 gig drive in software RAID 5.

I would have done (8) 500 gig.

(4) on on controller, and (4) on the other, and mirrored them in windows...

It would be much faster...

MLMIB · Mar 23, 2006

just tryin to get the most space for the least, got each 250 for 50 off of woot, so can't beat the price deal.

anyway, any idea's about how to speed it up? there was a dual xeon with each running at 3 ghz, would all 4 threads get used though? would a dual opteron be better? does linux build software raid faster? I just can't deal with these sloooowwwww speads,

MLMIB · Mar 23, 2006

so the choices for possible upgrade paths seem to be dual xeons @ 3.0ghz each or dual opteron 240's(1.4 ghz each)

I'm thinkin the dual xeons will be better, but just want to make sure... 'n will all 4 threads get used?

Joeteck · Mar 23, 2006

You have too many disks in an array without NCQing. Thats why it is so slooooooow.

IDE and SATA w/o NCQ has always had this problem. IDE can only do one command at a time and usually 100% CPU. Since you have 9 of them in a software RAID. Jeez... Must take a long time to copy a simple 50 meg file.. Thats why SCSI is so popular in servers..where this problem does not exist.

EDIT: If one disk goes out of sync, then it will have to do that whole 32 hour deal all over again. And if you shut down before its finished, it will have to restart all over again.

MLMIB · Mar 23, 2006

um, it takes 16 days to resync...

will getting a faster cpu help this or is it all limited by the hard drives?

bchur83 · Mar 23, 2006

You are limited by the CPU at this point. The only way to get a real performance speed-up would be to use a Hardware Raid Controller. Even the fastest of CPUs would have a hard time running that large of an array. Hardware raid is the only way to go.

Joeteck · Mar 23, 2006

MLMIB said:
um, it takes 16 days to resync...

will getting a faster cpu help this or is it all limited by the hard drives?

sorry, 16 days... That's just plain nuts... When its re syncing forget about accessing anything on the disk...

Faster CPU's will not help you.

Breaking up the raid 5 in smaller arrays will. 2TB is nice but a fast 1TB is better.

If you can do hardware RAID, do it.

(4) 250 gig drives RAID 0
(4) 250 gig Drives RAID 0+1 hot spare.

Use Windows server to do a Software RAID 1 between the two RAID 0's.

This config will smoke.

MLMIB · Mar 23, 2006

I'm not looking for speed out of this at all, I'm just trying to use it as a dumb storage for lots and lots of movies and music. most people here(college) just take lots of hard drives 'n just dumb copy, only problem with that is that if they lose a drive its gone, I just wanted to have some insurance against drive failure. is there any way to get a cheap most of these onto a hardware raid?

also will cpu speed increase cut the time by the same degree? like if I get 4x the processing speed, will it cut the resyncing time to 1/4th?

Joeteck · Mar 23, 2006

What is the specs of your hardware?

Mobo, CPU, RAM, etc...

raid 5 software under win2k3 question

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