October 27, 201213 yr I'm running 4.7,..and had the server off-line until I recently received a new motherboard. I replaced MB,..and all is well. Server up, drives perfect. I had a 500G drive as my Parity drive and wanted to replace with a 2TB drive. I shutdown the server,...removed old drive, installed new 2TB drive and booted up. When I went to the server url,..I see that it automatically saw the new drive and says: "Stopped. Upgrading parity" with a flashing Blue ball next to it. All remaining drives are flashing Green balls. I'm hoping/guessing that this is normal, and after some period of time,..the Parity drive upgrade will be complete. Question: How long does this process take? It's been running about 3 hours now.
October 27, 201213 yr I'm running 4.7,..and had the server off-line until I recently received a new motherboard. I replaced MB,..and all is well. Server up, drives perfect. I had a 500G drive as my Parity drive and wanted to replace with a 2TB drive. I shutdown the server,...removed old drive, installed new 2TB drive and booted up. When I went to the server url,..I see that it automatically saw the new drive and says: "Stopped. Upgrading parity" with a flashing Blue ball next to it. All remaining drives are flashing Green balls. I'm hoping/guessing that this is normal, and after some period of time,..the Parity drive upgrade will be complete. Question: How long does this process take? It's been running about 3 hours now. No, you've been duped by poor wording on the screen. You are in the process of upgrading parity. (that is what it should say) and the actual parity calculation will start when you check the 'I'm sure' checkbox and press "Start" So... If you do nothing, it will wait an infinite time for you to press "Start" So far, it apparently has waited (patiently) for over 3 hours for you to press "Start". Once you press "Start", it will begin the parity-calc process and once done the upgrade will be complete. Joe L.
October 27, 201213 yr Author Joe: THANKS! I guess I couldn't see the forests in the trees (or whatever),....that's why I need my wife to find the mayonnaise in the refrigerator. You are right when you say "poor wording". It wan't obvious to check the "I'm sure" box,..to enable the Start button. It's running now!!!
October 27, 201213 yr For the sake of completeness. "i couldn't see the forest for all the trees", but you got the point across. I can always find the mayo, but that ketchup is a ninja! Also, the upgrade will take the same amount of time a parity check would take you if I'm right in assuming it will not check past the largest drive (so if your largest is 500, it would not check the remaining 1.5 tb)
October 27, 201213 yr For the sake of completeness. "i couldn't see the forest for all the trees", but you got the point across. I can always find the mayo, but that ketchup is a ninja! Also, the upgrade will take the same amount of time a parity check would take you if I'm right in assuming it will not check past the largest drive (so if your largest is 500, it would not check the remaining 1.5 tb) Actually, it does process all 2TB. It just can "read" the final 1.5TB really fast (since it simply substitutes zeros read from memory and does not have to wait for spinning disks to read), but it is still going to have to "write" the calculated parity to the parity drive for that 1.5TB. Even writing at 100MB/s it will take 10 seconds per GB, or 6GB per minute. 1500GB / 6 = 250 minutes... (a bit over 4 hours) for the final 1.5TB. In reality, it might only get between 50 and 100MB/s, so expect it to take as much as 8 hours or more for the entire process.
October 27, 201213 yr Author Thanks again,...but I'm seeing that the estimated calculation says about 20 hours. Total size: 1,953,514,552 KB Current position: 89,236,024 (4.5%) Estimated speed: 26,603 KB/sec Estimated finish: 1167.8 minutes
October 31, 201213 yr Author Just an update,..instead of the estimated 20 hours,...it actually only took 8 hours.
October 31, 201213 yr Just an update,..instead of the estimated 20 hours,...it actually only took 8 hours. The initial estimates are often way off, as they base the estimated speed on the slowest disks and include the time needed to spin up the disks where no data was actually transferred.
October 31, 201213 yr The same procedure in my box, that originally has 3 WD20EARX, both data disks are 95% full. On monday I've received 6 WD30EFRX, so I took the array offline and replaced the parity disk with a new one. And it takes 25 hours to rebuild the parity. The box is a HP Microserver NL36 with 8gb of RAM.
October 31, 201213 yr The same procedure in my box, that originally has 3 WD20EARX, both data disks are 95% full. On monday I've received 6 WD30EFRX, so I took the array offline and replaced the parity disk with a new one. And it takes 25 hours to rebuild the parity. The box is a HP Microserver NL36 with 8gb of RAM. 25 hours is way to long for a parity build. Sounds like a disk is having issues. Check syslog and SMART reports. Start a new thread.
October 31, 201213 yr Author Like JoeL said,...it appears the initial estimates when it starts to upgrade the parity drive are way off. I liken it to Windows MSI Installers,....they'll get stuck on 25% done for like 15 minutes,..and then the it'll shoot to 100%.
October 31, 201213 yr What's the bottleneck for a parity calculation? Controller I/O? Cpu? Controller I/O and/or Disk I/O. Even if absolutely no calculations are being performed, you can read a single disk at a sustained speed between 75 and 100 MB/s. At 100MB/s it takes 10 seconds to read one GB. You can therefore, at best, with a single disk read 6 GB per minute. At 6 GB per minute, you can read 2000 GB (2TB) in 333 minutes. ( 5.55 hours ) Now, with ANY bottleneck of disk I/O, it will go slower. If the PCI bus is limiting, it will go slower. The actual parity calc is very quick and even with an old CPU is not a bottleneck. If it actually took 8 hours, the effective rate was probably closer to 75 MB/s. Joe L.
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