Okay, so I picked up a Dell PERC 5/i for cheap on ebay, and gave it 1gb of fully buffered memory (only 512mb usable due to its chipset) that I had laying around. I have 8 2tb Western Digitial Caviar blacks that have been waiting on an enclosure from china to use with this controller, but I got fed up and needed the space so I tossed the array together in a temporary housing. I used the quick initialize function of the controller which basically initializes a basic set of parameters for parity information, and sets up the array so the OS can see it, it then offloads the initialization to a background thread on the controller and only continues the thread when the array is idle (default below 30% processor usage). This all went well, and performed as expected. However, after leaving the controller dead idle for around 12 hours, it still says its going to take an additional 67 hours to finish initializing. Is this normal?
My raid configuration is as follows:
7/8 drives -> Raid 5
1/8 drives -> Hot Spare
This seemed most logical to me as I get N-2 capacity, and the ability to suffer two simultaneous or consecutive drive losses without information loss, and without exponentially increased cost of the array.
I did some benchmarks, and those seem above what I would expect for an uninitialized array (325mb/s read, 320mb/s write - very very impressive numbers for raid 5)
My raid configuration is as follows:
7/8 drives -> Raid 5
1/8 drives -> Hot Spare
This seemed most logical to me as I get N-2 capacity, and the ability to suffer two simultaneous or consecutive drive losses without information loss, and without exponentially increased cost of the array.
I did some benchmarks, and those seem above what I would expect for an uninitialized array (325mb/s read, 320mb/s write - very very impressive numbers for raid 5)
MYGODITSFULLOFSTARS
(13 items) |
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MYGODITSFULLOFSTARS
(13 items) |
