Raident

Not really a support question, but I just started doing a rebuild and was quite surprised (read: concerned) that it took 35 minutes to mount the replacement disk and start the rebuild process, when it usually takes seconds. Is there something special going on during rebuilds?

One of my disks just failed. The replacement drive is currently being precleared as I type, but one random thing that just popped in my mind as I wait is that in the many years of using the array, I've run many parity checks but never actually checked the data itself. I do have backups of the data, but those only go back a year so if something happened to an old file prior to 2020 I wouldn't be able to tell by comparing with the backup. On the other hand, I could theoretically get fresh copies (the vast majority of the files on my array were originally downloaded off the internet) to check with, but that would be... very labor-intensive, not to mention tedious, and I'm sure there's a number of files/providers that have since gone offline over the years. Thus, I figure it wouldn't hurt to ask the community if anyone has better ideas?

Wow, this is everything I was looking for, and then some! Thanks I'll try it out when I have time this weekend and let you know how it goes.