ICH10R / Intel Rapid Storage Technology Raid 1 Rebuild Running Very Slow

[mbmast]

I regularly yank out one drive from a Raid 1 volume and visit my safe deposit box where I swap the drive with the one in the vault. The one from the vault gets inserted and I do a rebuild. I've been doing this for a few years, never had a problem.

This time, the rebuild starts as usual. 12 hours later I check it and the rebuild is only at 28% complete. The rebuild normally takes about an hour or two. The system is up and running fine. No OS issues. IRST reports 0 blocks with media errors. Why would this process go from a maximum of 2 hours to over 12 (and at only 28% complete, will likely take another 24 hours)?

 

[Hawkeye22]

I would try taking the drive out of raid then run some diagnostics on it. The raid controller can hide or not pass thru certain drive information.

Also, how much actual storage were you using before compared to now? if you have a significant amount of new data to be mirrored, it may take a while.

 

[mbmast]

It's a 1TB drive. I've gone from about 650GB used to 820GB used. The rebuild ran overnight and only got to 28%. Then, over the next 3 hours it completed. Very strange.

 

[Hawkeye22]

That's odd. Glad it finished, but it almost sounds like either the rebuild priority is set really low or it was attempting to read/write some potentially bad sectors and sppeded up once it got past them.

 

[mbmast]

Hawkeye22, thanks for your participation. Luckily this didn't turn into a problem for me. I'm going to be asking a new question here (probably not until Monday though) regarding SED drives. Hope you can help with that one too!

Thanks.

 

[vanilla2]

I would try taking the drive out of raid then run some diagnostics on it. The raid controller can hide or not pass thru certain drive information.

NOTE: You may not need to remove drive(s) from the array to do hardware-diagnostics. In almost all cases, gsmartcontrol and/or smartmontools can run short and long SMART tests on individual physical HD or SSD without needing to remove them from the array. I have many win764 boxes with various intel RST or perc raid setups (1,5,10), and I can test each of the physical drives. But be careful, on some older XP boxes, trying to run the smart test causes an immediate BSOD.... ymmv. Once manually running tests works ok for you, then you'll want to setup smartmontools to do automatic scheduled testing, like one short per day, one long per week. For windows, the installer of fos smartmontools here http://www.netpower.fr/smartmontools has an option to pop up a notification in windows as well as send email(s) if critical smart parameters change. If you see such warnings, run gsmartcontrol and look for items hi-lited in red or pink: hover the mouse over such items for explanations. For self-tests, if you don't see "Completed without error" then drive will often be replaced if under warranty. For linux boxes, you usually just do something like: apt-get install smartmontools smart-notifier gsmartcontrol Info on the smartmontools website http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers details which raid-pass-thru is supported, etc.