Building a 12TB (16TB actual) software RAID 5 array takes a long time.
Glad the transformer that exploded last night didn’t do so while this was going on.
All data is backed up, so no real worries but still — drives have gotten larger while the software hasn’t gotten any faster or better.
Interesting. Were these SSDs or spinning platters? Would it make a difference in the time it took?
All spinning platters, 3TB WD Green drives specifically.
It took about 10 hours to sync the array. With SSDs, it would’ve been more like two hours I’m guessing. Or maybe even less.
Using mdadm in Linux. It’s pretty reliable for software RAID. I’d had a smaller array before and when testing did some pretty heinous things like removing an added drive while syncing and all the data was fine — I’ve seen worse with hardware RAID cards, which I don’t really trust at all for most brands.
So I’m pretty pleased with it, and I’ve created an internal bitmap so that if a re-sync has to occur for some reason it’ll be fast. (Adding a new drive will always be slow, though.)