9260 Reconstruction seems slooooooooow

[jrolmstd]

OK, I got the LSI 9260 and the intel port expander installed. Set up the initial RAID 5 with 1.5Tx6 drives, set up in win 7 and ran some tests. Very pleased with the results compared to the software RAID solution I was running. Figured out how to add another drive into the existing drive group and started up the process to expand the group with another 1.5T drive. 8 hours later, 5% completed, estimated time to completion 130 hours

Seems incredibly slow and I am concerned that the time to completion is dependent on the size of the drive being added and the size of the drive group. I was only looking to add 1 drive to the group and when I tried to create a new virtual drive under a new group, the only RAID option was RAID 0, not what I was looking for. I assume that I would have had to be adding at least 3 drives to get a RAID 5 option to show up under a new virtual drive..

Is there a better (faster) way of doing this? Does the length of time to add another drive to the group increase with the size of the ARRAY?

 

[hotcrandel]

I'd say that I'm not surprised about the time.

RAID rebuilds and expands usually take a lot of time.

There isn't really a faster way except depending on how much existing data, backup and starting from scratch.

 

[ben805]

I'd say that I'm not surprised about the time.

RAID rebuilds and expands usually take a lot of time.

There isn't really a faster way except depending on how much existing data, backup and starting from scratch.

+1

it's quicker to break the RAID 5 array and restore from backup instead unless you have PB of data...

 

[drescherjm]

RAID rebuilds and expands usually take a lot of time.

This is a crazy amount of time for me. Although I am more familiar with linux software raid5/6 with modern quad core or better processors (using all cores for the rebuild / expand). On HW raid you may have some control of this in the policies you set. I remember the areca card I have on a windows 2003 workstation has options for how aggressively it rebuilds in the web interface.

Do you have a BBU installed and the card configured for Write Back Cache?

 

[grogthegreat]

That is taking much longer than it should. In the settings you can change the priority of the expand in the settings to speed things up. Maybe that setting got set very low some how for that card.

 

[jrolmstd]

This is a crazy amount of time for me. Although I am more familiar with linux software raid5/6 with modern quad core or better processors (using all cores for the rebuild / expand). On HW raid you may have some control of this in the policies you set. I remember the areca card I have on a windows 2003 workstation has options for how aggressively it rebuilds in the web interface.

Do you have a BBU installed and the card configured for Write Back Cache?

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Yes I do have a BBU and it is configured with WBC.

I had noticed that defining a new RAID group was significantly faster than this but I was between a rock and a hard place. The drive I am assimilating contained part of my backups I created when I blew away the software RAID solution. I copied the files from the back up to the array and then started the rebuild...

One point of interest, the array only contains about 650G of data. The rest has never been used..

I will look into the options focusing on priorities but I will post the config here for feedback as well. Not sure if I can change anything while this is running or not...

It has been running now for a couple of days. Hours of execution being reported do not accurately reflect the length of time it has been running so not sure how accurate the time to completion is either. It is what it is I guess..

thanks again, most appreciated.

 

[jrolmstd]

Here is a screen shot showing the back ground priorities along with a resource monitor shot. Notice there is little or no CPU utilization going on during this process. Tried reseting the values but change would not take. Assume it is because of the current process running, Any way around this?

 

[hotcrandel]

I believe the expand should be using the processor on the LSI card, not your cpu.

Are there any properties in the LSI config program that speed up the expand?

 

[jrolmstd]

I believe the expand should be using the processor on the LSI card, not your cpu.

Are there any properties in the LSI config program that speed up the expand?

The only adjustable options I found were for the background operations shown in the screen shot. I can adjust them but the report never changes indicating the changes were applied. Was looking for a way to suspend the current process so I could adjust the reconstruction rate but found nothing....

 

[drescherjm]

Here is a screen shot showing the back ground priorities along with a resource monitor shot. Notice there is little or no CPU utilization going on during this process. Tried reseting the values but change would not take. Assume it is because of the current process running, Any way around this?

I would make the reconstruction rate and the rebuild rate to 100 or whatever the maximum that the form allows.