RAID rebuild times.

[ajf]

This more out of interest than anything.
We purchased a new Dell server that should have had a single 48Tb RAID 5 array.
They managed to screw it up and created two separate arrays so we had to rebuild it.
Currently looking at around 9 days(!).

Question then, how do Dell commercially configure these large RAID arrays when building servers?
I can't see them having a room of servers all merrily building away for 9+ days at a time.

On another note, any ideas if we could speed up the rebuild?

 

[ajf]

Maybe that is the case then.
I am not personally doing it. The drives are new and blank so no data to keep anyway.

 

[ajf]

Think we found the 'problem'.
Looks like instead of trashing both arrays and starting from scratch, only one was trashed and the disks added to the other one, hence it was doing a full rebuild rather than just an initial build.
We chose RAID 5 as it was deemed sufficient for the use. It isn't live data, but is used for Veeam backups of our VMs, hence the requirement for the large size.
It's 12x 4Tb SAS disks on a hardware RAID controller. Server is a Poweredge 730XD.
The rebuild was via the Dell Open Manage software as it was done remotely.