I am currently replacing a drive with an 8TB Seagate, I know writes to these drives are slow, but its saying that its going to take over four days to complete....Its been running for 2hrs and 7min and is going at a rate of 21.3MB/sec is this normal? I just replaced my parity drive with an 8TB Seagate and that rebuild took about 24hrs. This drive that I am replacing currently is hanging off my Areca 1261, I supposed that might have something to do with it.

So I am beginning to wonder if the Seagate 8TB drives are just not a good match with my Areca raid controller. What would happen if I was to stop the rebuild, power down and put the original drive back it, would it still do a parity resync? I think I want to try this and try the 8TB on an onboard SATA port or connected to a SATA card I have in the server. If someone can answer me on the power down and put the original drive back, I'd appreciate it.

Anyone?

So this drive that you are replacing is not the parity drive? It is a data drive? It's a little confusing because in the first post it sounds like you already replaced parity, but now you are talking about a parity resync instead of a data disk rebuild.

You are correct, sorry for the confusion. I have already replaced the parity drive and the parity sync has completed. I am now replacing a 2TB data drive with an 8TB drive and the data disk rebuild is going too slow. Can I stop it, and put the original data disk back?  I think my Areca controller doesn't like the 8TB Seagate.

No personal experience with that controller.

 

So is the original drive OK? And you just want to put it back in?

 

You could do a New Config with the original drive. If you haven't written anything to the new drive you could probably even get away with trusting parity and not have to rebuild it. You should do a parity check though.

So if I just want to put the original drive back, power down, swap the drive, power up and I'm good? But you would recommend a parity check, they take 24hrs for me  :'(

So if I just want to put the original drive back, power down, swap the drive, power up and I'm good? But you would recommend a parity check, they take 24hrs for me  :'(

Nope. If you just put the original drive back, it's going to complain that it's not big enough. Have to follow trurl's directions.

Ah so but the original drive back in and do a new config? Do I start the array with the original drive and then do new config or do new config then start the array?

It won't let you start the array with different disks than the last time you started it. That is why you have to do New Config. Then it will forget all about your disk assignments and let you start over. Be sure you assign all your drives correctly, especially parity. If you accidentally assign a data disk to the parity slot it will get overwritten.

 

When you New Config a parity rebuild is what it will do by default when you start. But in this case since the parity should be in sync with the data on the old drive it should be OK to skip that by checking the box to tell it to trust parity before you start. I say should, not would. It depends on what else has happened that I don't know about. That is why I think you should do a parity check. If it were me I would do the parity check even though I would know what else happened.

 

If it turns out that you get a lot of parity errors when checking you should stop and New Config and this time let it rebuild parity since that should be faster than checking and then correcting a lot of parity errors.

 

Or you could just forget about it and just New Config the default way and let it rebuild parity.

Ok thanks everyone for their help, array is now back up and running. Fortunately I am religious about taking screen shots of my drive setup anytime I make a change, so putting the drives back in their order was a piece of cake. I think I will let the array run for a few days until I swap out any more drives for larger ones.

So I have swapped out a drive connected to my onboard SATA controller with my 8TB Seagate and it is rebuilding at expected speeds around 57-58MB/sec. I guess my old Areca raid controller is incompatible with the Seagate 8TB drives, good to know.