I did stop the array, placed the disk in, refreshed, assigned the disk, and then I started the array. It automatically started the clearing process (did receive an e-mail as well). I can see the LED activity is only on the new disk, the rest are idle...

 

So, it seems to me I can use the system w/o affecting the clearing process speed...correct?

 

Thnx

In general, yes.

Yes, you can. It's doing exactly what it says, clearing the new disk - literally filling it with zeros. When it has finished it will add the disk to the existing array. I personally would have shut the server down before inserting the new disk.

@John_M

The clear did finish yesterday, but I did not notice this until today, I was checking the daily status email and it is stating that parity was last checked yesterday around the time it finished clearing the new HDD.

 

The issue here is that the other HDDs were idle, so how did the system check the parity?!

 

Thnx

22 minutes ago, Mat1926 said:

The issue here is that the other HDDs were idle, so how did the system check the parity?!

 

The only way a parity check can be performed is with the disks spinning. Here's the relevant part from my own syslog:

May  1 05:00:01 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (157): check NOCORRECT
May  1 05:00:01 Lapulapu kernel: 
May  1 05:00:01 Lapulapu kernel: md: recovery thread: check P Q ...
May  1 05:00:01 Lapulapu kernel: md: using 8192k window, over a total of 4883770532 blocks.
...
May  1 14:22:19 Lapulapu kernel: md: sync done. time=33737sec
May  1 14:22:19 Lapulapu kernel: md: recovery thread: completion status: 0
May  1 16:22:20 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (158): spindown 0
May  1 16:22:21 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (159): spindown 1
May  1 16:22:21 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (160): spindown 2
May  1 16:22:22 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (161): spindown 3
May  1 16:22:23 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (162): spindown 4
May  1 16:22:24 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (163): spindown 5
May  1 16:22:25 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (164): spindown 6
May  1 16:22:26 Lapulapu kernel: mdcmd (165): spindown 29

You'll notice that spin-ups aren't logged, though spin-downs are. Check your log.

I just started parity check w/o corrections. The last one was more than 40 days ago, and since the system reports wrong info, I thought that it is better to start a fresh one...

 

Thnx

I was checking the daily status email and it is stating that parity was last checked yesterday around the time it finished clearing the new HDD.

That's an old bug, any disk clear or rebuild will show as the last parity check.