EEK!!! Raid setup - what's going on?

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

TheBigCheese

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6 Sep 2005
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Hi guys

I'm using a Raid5 setup on an Asus P5B Deluxe board.
It's used as the Windows / general important data / pagefile drive.

Last night I noticed things were slowing down, this morning as it booted I noticed on the Raid boot/setup screen it showed the RAID5 setup as 'initializing' and was written in yellow rather than the nice everything-is-fine green wording.

What's going on and how can I fix it? I use this machine for business all day and I can't be doing with it slowing down to a crawl all the time. :(

Thanks in advance!
 
It sounds like the RAID controller has decided that one of the drives went offline and hence is rebuilding the array - this involves recalculating the data which should be on the drive which had the issue. It's a slow process, especially with onboard RAID5 because the main CPU has to do all the parity calculations.

Unfortunaltely there's nothing you can do other than let the rebuild run it's course. Just be thankful that it'll do it online, I can remember using SCSI RAID5 arrays 7 or 8 years ago that everything like this had to be done offline. If a disk failed the machine was offline for a day while it rebuilt.
 
That sounds a bit grim....looks like I will just have to sit it out then.

Any ideas how long it might take? I think they are 3x 250Gb Seagates.

I've got a lot of video to be encoding if at all possible today...typical eh?
 
is raid 5 on 3 drives any faster than JABOD? wouldn't you be 100% better with a stripe array?
 
I imagine JABOD would be as fast as the slowest drive...so it's probably faster as these are Seagate 7200.10 drives.

A stripe would be no good for me, as I mentioned this is a business machine primarily and if one drive went wobbly on a stripe I would have lost everything now.
 
VeNT said:
is raid 5 on 3 drives any faster than JABOD? wouldn't you be 100% better with a stripe array?
Click to expand...
JBOD will be significantly slower than RAID5 on the same disks. With JBOD the read performance at any point is determined simply by the disk holding the data in question, rather than being affected by any other disk in the "array".

RAID5 should give read speeds about equivalent to those of a RAID0 array with one less disk.
 
Hey that was quick.

It's fixed itself, both RAIDs I use are now functioning normally...and it's not half speeded up again! :D :D :D

Thanks for the information and reassurance during the panic stricken morning lol :)
 
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