Areca 1880 Raid Expansion/Init Times

Brainbug

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 15, 2012
Messages
92
Just some info for anyone planning to do an online Raid & volume expansion.

Running 1880ix16 with ST5000DM000 (5900 RPM) drives.

Started with a healthy 3x5TB array and wanted to add a 4th drive. Throughout the expansion process it was running 2xVMs with low IO load.

First thing, when you perform a RAID expansion you need to add the drive to the RAID Array. Once it is added, you then need to expand the volume with the new space. In hindsight, it would have been much faster to simply backup the RAID blow it away then reinit the RAID, but once I was started, I didn't want to risk stopping it.

Code:
2015-01-24 08:01:12 ST5000-VOL#001   : Complete Migrate
Elapse Time : 193:54:07
2015-01-29 11:16:16 ST5000-VOL#001   : Complete Init
Elapse Time : 113:46:05

Yes, these are consumer drives, and I am not a storage expert, but from my perspective it isn't worth the greatly added cost for enterprise drives when the price difference allows for a hot spare and you need to have backups anyway.
 
There usually are settings that you can force the expansion to happen faster.
 
5+ Days to do a simple expansion is way too slow. Either you had much more IO going on than you thought, or you have background on the Areca set to something VERY low, like 20%. I have done new inits on that card for 16 drive, 96TB arrays which took only 5 days.
 
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