Raid 5 array help

V

vroom125

New Member
Hi,

I've set up a computer with a raid 5 array which was working well at first. I think I may have done something I wasn't supposed to though, because in the past day, the Intel Matrix storage manager has initialized the volume, and now it is rebuilding the volume extremely slowly. I have not replaced any of the hard drives.

I'm using a Gigabyte motherboard with an onboard Raid controller. In addition to this, I have installed the Intel Matrix storage manager.

Things that I have done in the past that might be related are defragmenting the hard drive and using the disk cleanup utility to clean up previous restore points and shadow copies. Does the issue have to do with the fact that I used disk clean up?

I used the disk clean up utility becaues there was a lot of unaccounted for used up space on the drive.

Thanks for the help
-Vroom
 
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I also just called WD tech support, and they told me that defragmentation is not recommended for a raid 5 array. ?
 
I also just called WD tech support, and they told me that defragmentation is not recommended for a raid 5 array. ?
Click to expand...
You can defrag arrays, but I wouldn't do it very often. You tend to get a lot of data moving across disks when you do it.
 
HI,
My latest computer is set up in RAID 1 using the Intel Storage Manager. In the last year, I have made mistakes which has caused the system to go into the rebuild and repair mode. I don't think it is slow per se. I just think there is huge amount of work going on to check and/or rebuild two 500 GB disks. It takes time. In all cases, normal operation has been restored.

The mistake that seems to have caused this to happen is when I was forced to power down the computer rather than going through the normal shut down procedure. I have learned that this is something I should not do unless there is no other choice. It seems that the Storage Manger assumes that the disks are no longer synchronized (and they may well not be) and it wants to make sure all is well. In all other cases, the RAID 1 setup has worked perfectly. I'm very happy with this set up.

Sparky
 
unless you have a battery attached to your machine to properly power down the machine when you lose power to your location you should NEVER turn on the 'write cache' for the raid array. This will almost always cause a loss of data on the raid array when the machine looses power abruptly.

As for defragging a raid array. I bet you could call up wd a few times and get a different answer each time.. Many vendors support defrag, many vendors do not.

I would recommend defragging the array. I do it to the arrays I have that run microsoft stuff on them without issue and the hosting company I sub contract for does it to their windows servers without issue.

No operation of moving data on the raid array should specifically damage the raid array.

Having failed sectors on a harddrive could cause the array to want to verify , initialize, rebuild.

I wouldn't set up a raid5 with less than 4 disks.

Did you reboot your machine and it started the initialize?

What gigabyte board do you have?
 
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