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I'm building a raid 5 array with 3 1.5TB drives on CentOS 5.5 using mdadm. Everything seems to be working fine, except it's taking forever and I'm not sure if that's normal. It's going on 6 hours now and /proc/mdstat says it's only at 6% (@ ~37MBps). At this rate it's going to take the better half of a week to finish.

I've never setup a raid before so I'm not sure if I did something wrong. It seems like the initial setup should be a lot faster since there is no data on any of the drives.

Also, after I have the raid set up I've got data to transfer over from a drive then I'll be adding it to the array. Is it going to take a similar amount of time to grow the array after? I know they're huge hard drives but this seems ridiculous.

jlorich
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1 Answers1

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There have been many other questions asking this (others will surely post comments with them), but I happen to have this sitting open:

HowTo: Speed Up Linux Software Raid Building And Re-syncing

In summary: change your /proc/sys/dev/raid/{speed_limit_max,speed_limit_min} to something larger.

From the article:

To see current limits, enter:

sysctl dev.raid.speed_limit_min

sysctl dev.raid.speed_limit_max

To increase speed, enter:

echo value > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

OR

sysctl -w dev.raid.speed_limit_min=value

Bitmaps optimize rebuild time after a crash, or after removing and re-adding a device. Turn it on by typing the following command:

mdadm --grow --bitmap=internal /dev/md0

Once array rebuild or fully synced, disable bitmaps:

mdadm --grow --bitmap=none /dev/md0

Andrew
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  • Thanks for the help, I really didn't see this when searching. I went ahead and implemented the changes but didn't any increase in speed. I asked this on reddit.com too and someone mentioned that the array is still usable while the initial creation is running, and lo and behold, it is, so it's formatting now. – jlorich Jul 24 '10 at 09:06