Raid 5 Array Restoring...Safe to Use?

PoW

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2001
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So after a drive failure in my new 1.2Tb raid5 array I left the whole system off until my replacement arrived out of fear of a second drive failing. But now the second drive has arrived and the array is restoring itself to full functionality. The downside...its going to take the next 20+ hours at the rate its going.

My question is, is it safe to start transfering media without risking corruption? I have a music collection I would prefer to remain in 1 piece but at the same time direly need to transfer onto the raid array. Should I do it or should I wait until tomorrow afternoon to take care of this?
 
It should be good to go at this point, but if you can wait, why not? I'm no RAID-5 expert, but common sense would tell me that transfering data to the array while it rebuilds would slow the whole process down.
 
give the rebuild priority
while its unusual if a second drive where to bite it youd be screwed beyond recovery

but you should consider some of the potential root causes can be shared across drives in the same array,
for instance power, or drives that where shipped together when purchased
 
PoW said:
So after a drive failure in my new 1.2Tb raid5 array I left the whole system off until my replacement arrived out of fear of a second drive failing. But now the second drive has arrived and the array is restoring itself to full functionality. The downside...its going to take the next 20+ hours at the rate its going.

My question is, is it safe to start transfering media without risking corruption? I have a music collection I would prefer to remain in 1 piece but at the same time direly need to transfer onto the raid array. Should I do it or should I wait until tomorrow afternoon to take care of this?

WOW 20+ hours?!?!?!?!

I take it your running a software RAID 5? I have a terabyte with about 655 gig of data on it. I yanked a drive and slid a new one in to check rebuild times, it was done 3 hours and some seconds.
 
greatly depends on the card and the array size
my SX6000 takes about 7 Hours w\ 6x40GB :p
(To initialize or synchronize, never had to rebuild)
 
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