RE: Questions about software RAID level 1 (how long should it take to sync, etc?)
Hi!
I had similar problem few days ago - after numerous server restarts due to
many power outages, raid1 became faulty and had to resync. It initially run
is about 1MB/s. When I stopped one disk-intensive process, the speed bumped
to about 20-25MB/s and stayed that high for entire process (less than 3
hours). These are two 160GB SATA drives.
So the reason of slow sync is mainly other disk operation, which makes the
disks seek a lot and lowers transfer-rate.
--
bYE, Marki
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Garey [mailto:random51k@gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 11:54 PM
> To: debian-isp@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Questions about software RAID level 1 (how long
> should it take to sync, etc?)
>
> I'm in the process of setting up a software RAID level 1 on
> debian testing with two 160 gig drives on an Asus P4P800
> motherboard with Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz and 512 megs of
> RAM. I've been following the instructions in
> /usr/share/doc/mdadm/rootraiddoc.97.html and have just issued
> the command "mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/hda1" to add my
> original debian installation to the RAID array (after already
> having copied the contents of hda1 to hdc1, and then
> rebooting from hdc1).
> When I cat /proc/mdstat, I get the following:
>
> [>....................] recovery = 4.9% (7907776/158577472)
> finish=1533.5min speed=1636K/sec
>
> I'm curious about a few things:
>
> 1) does 25 hours seem like a reasonable amount of time for an
> initial synchronization of two 160 gig drives?
>
> 2) would using a hardware card (such as a 3ware 7006-2
> Parallel ATA RAID Controller) decrease the amount of time to sync?
>
> 3) will it take this long to synchronize the drives after,
> say, a system crash (ie a hard reboot), or does it only take
> 25 hours for the initial sync ?
>
> 4) If I do decide to switch to hardware RAID, will I be able
> to use the same drives without a large
> configuration/resyncrhonization process?
>
> 5) if hda1 contained the original root system, and hdc1 is
> simply a copy of it (ie the drives are a mirror), why is it
> taking 25 hours to "synchronize" the drives, aren't they
> already sync'd? Shouldn't this be a much faster process?
>
> Any help or suggestions are very much appreciated. Thanks!
>
> Mike
>
>
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