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I have an Adaptec 8805.

I've been running 12x6TB RAID6 drives without issue. I just bought five 5x8TB drives and wanted to add them as a new partition in RAID5.

I used the CTRL+A bios menu to initialize the new drives. In retrospect this wasn't a good idea. I choose to initialize them in the background. When I went to quit the application I got the standard "Rebooting the system, Please Wait" message.

Its been 5 hours, and the system hasn't rebooted, and all my drives appear to be in use, although the new ones more so then the others.

Whats going on? How long does this process take? What happens if I restart the computer at this stage?

Adaptec Rebooting

Video of blinking Norco case. http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=x5o76e%3E&s=9

Greg Askew
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Mikhail
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  • My 2 cents... doesn't it just sound like it failed to reboot? That's not some junk raid controller - if it was doing something, I'd imagine it would say so. – Ryan Babchishin Sep 13 '16 at 05:16
  • @RyanBabchishin Oh, hell no. Adaptec *only* makes junk RAID controllers. Avoid like the plague. – HopelessN00b Sep 13 '16 at 19:49
  • @HopelessN00b Yeah, frankly I wasn't too impressed. Whats a better controller model? – Mikhail Sep 13 '16 at 23:03
  • @Mikhail The only tolerable ones I've found came with Dell or HP servers... so I stopped messing around and bought a used Dell storage server. – HopelessN00b Sep 14 '16 at 15:41
  • DO NOT USE RAID 5 WITH THOSE DISKS - R5 is essentially dead and has been for over half a decade, if you like your data do not use R5/50 - only R1/10 and R6/60 are acceptable. We can bore you with math behind this or google it for yourself but please, please do not use R5. – Chopper3 Sep 14 '16 at 18:07

2 Answers2

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Whats going on?

Some kind of a software problem?

How long does this process take?

It should be immediate...

What happens if I restart the computer at this stage?

The next morning, I pressed the restart button on my server. I'm currently 50% complete with a data integrity verification, as of now, there don't appear to be any errors.

I've been disappointed with my experience using Adaptec products, their software is buggy and the performance scales poorly.

Mikhail
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It's initializing your array. You could wait it out, but I couldn't tell you how long that would take. For 8TB drives, it could take many more hours.

I would just reset the thing if time was an issue and if it was a new array that I was creating, as all that will happen is you'll get either an array that is uninitialized, or the initialization process will continue in the background after a reboot. No other array will be affected.

Worst case, you can create a new array using the same disks without initializing immediately in the firmware level interface on boot, or create / initialize using the OS level tools.

If it keeps you from booting until it completes initialization, you'll have to pull the drives until it's done booting, then hot add them later (preferably using OS level tools to create the array on the "new" disks).

Spooler
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