RAID taking 5 days to rebuild?

J

jtr8178

Limp Gawd
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Jun 21, 2008
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I have a server that I inherited that has a failed hard drive. It runs a LSI MegaRaid, and had (4) 1 TB hard drives in it. Drive #3 failed, so I replaced it with an exact same model. I did a reboot, booted to Windows just fine, but I didn't any software that I could use to see the RAID configuration... So I rebooted, and this time went into the RAID manager instead of the OS... It automatically came up saying it was rebuilding the array.

It has been roughly 24 hours now, and it is only 15% done ... Is this typical? I can't view or do anything on the RAID Manager screen except it says "Hit ESC to cancel rebuild" ...

Will this thing rebuild it self if I cancel it and just let it go into the OS instead of sitting at the RAID manager screen? I'd rather not have this server offline for the next week waiting for the rebuild to get done.
 
That seems way too slow. Last time I rebuilt a 5x2TB RAID 5 I had it took about 10 hours. About 1hr/TB.
 
I agree ... it is a crappy RAID controller, so that might have something to do with it.

Will it continue to rebuild in the background if I cancel it and boot up the OS?
 
jtr8178 said:
I agree ... it is a crappy RAID controller, so that might have something to do with it.

Will it continue to rebuild in the background if I cancel it and boot up the OS?
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Yes it will continue to rebuild in the background. However, if it's taking that long I would be concerned around the health of the other drives. Any Smart errors?
 
Which LSI controller? It could be normal for all we know without a model number.
 
MegaRaid sounds like a built in controller on an older Intel motherboard. I remember an older server taking about 5 hours to build a 1TB array on fresh drives.
 
ryang said:
MegaRaid sounds like a built in controller on an older Intel motherboard. I remember an older server taking about 5 hours to build a 1TB array on fresh drives.
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MegaRAID is just LSI's model prefix for a RAID product. Could be an OEMed onboard solution or it could be LSI's highest end RAID controller.
 
Volkum said:
Which LSI controller? It could be normal for all we know without a model number.
Click to expand...

I can't figure out how to get one. I went into the RAID manager on boot-up, and it doesn't list it anywhere. I booted to the OS, went to Device Manager, and it doesn't list it there either. There is no RAID software loaded up either.

I'm not sure if it will display anywhere in the BIOS, but I'll check that Monday after it hopefully rebuilds itself over the weekend... Otherwise I'll opo it out of the rack, open the case, and see what we have.

It is a custom built server that was done about 4 years ago. I'm guessing it is a cheapie RAID controller, probably on-board.

Tyler
 
Probably something old or onboard is my guess then. You could always install MSM (MegaRAID Storage Manager) while you're at it.
 
jtr8178 said:
It is a custom built server that was done about 4 years ago. I'm guessing it is a cheapie RAID controller, probably on-board.

Tyler
Click to expand...

Open up the case and take a look. It's good to know anyway just in general. But it's still easier by FAR to look at SMART for errors. It would take seconds to do.
 
Last edited:
I finally got back around to this today.

The motherboard has the RAID controller integrated with it. It is a SuperMicro X8DT3-F, which has an integrated LSI 1068E.

I also popped back into the controller manager as boot-up, and it is only 78% done after 5 days.

I'm downloading the MSM software for it right now, and I'll look at SMART for errors.

Any advice on which software package I should use to look at SMART?
 
It has been roughly 24 hours now, and it is only 15% done ... Is this typical?
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No way is this typical. However you probably do not have a BBU with write back enabled and you probably did not enable the setting to force the raid to rebuild as fast as it can instead of lazy rebuilding in the background.
 
Any advice on which software package I should use to look at SMART?
Click to expand...

As a last resort a I believe modern linux livecd should support this via smartctl and SMART passthrough.
 
Bah, with all that screwing around I did, it is now rebuilding it again. At least now I have the MSM software installed so I can monitor it remotely. 2-1/2 hours in and 77 hours left to complete rebuild.

I'll wait until Monday to start doing some diagnostic tests on the drives.
 
I would watch the other drives, also watch the new drive did you test it before you installed it?
 
The LSI 1068E is just a SAS controller and does not provide hardware raid support. It has no own RAM and relies on the host CPU for the cache and parity calculation. Because it cannot store a larger portion of data in a safe onboard RAM cache, it will rebuild in very small chunks. I'm not sure if you can enable write-back caching for the "Integrated Raid" solutions, but that would make a data loss in case of a power failure more likely.
 
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