sbu Posted May 6, 2020 Posted May 6, 2020 I am trying to clear a drive in order to shrink my array. I originally started with the clear drive user script but am now just using dd in a screen. dd bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md5 status=progress Both the user script (which just ends up running this command AFAICT) and the raw command are progressing extremely slowly, at less than 1 MB/S. Is there some issue with the drive causing this or do I have a misconfiguration elsewhere? Quote
trurl Posted May 6, 2020 Posted May 6, 2020 Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post. Quote
sbu Posted May 6, 2020 Author Posted May 6, 2020 (edited) Attached is my diagnostics zip Edited May 6, 2020 by sbu EDIT: Removed diagnostics Quote
trurl Posted May 6, 2020 Posted May 6, 2020 Nothing obvious in those. Near end of syslog it says May 6 02:46:37 htpc-sbb clear_array_drive: Clearing Disk 5 is complete ### [PREVIOUS LINE REPEATED 1 TIMES] ### May 6 02:46:38 htpc-sbb emhttpd: cmd: /usr/local/emhttp/plugins/user.scripts/showLog.php clear_array_drive May 6 03:40:16 htpc-sbb crond[2646]: exit status 1 from user root /usr/local/sbin/mover &> /dev/null May 6 11:29:03 htpc-sbb sshd[2467]: Accepted password for root from 10.0.0.6 port 62012 ssh2 But I am guessing that "complete" wasn't really and so you went on to another method. Personally, I would just remove the disk and rebuild parity. Might even be faster. Quote
sbu Posted May 6, 2020 Author Posted May 6, 2020 Yeah I suspect that clear_array_drive output is premature since I aborted the script when it was running so slow. Quote
sbu Posted May 6, 2020 Author Posted May 6, 2020 Because the drive was empty I followed the steps in the Shrink Array document to format it first. It's now zero-ing out at a much faster rate. Quote
trurl Posted May 6, 2020 Posted May 6, 2020 Not clear why that would make any difference at all. Formatting a drive just writes an empty filesystem to it. The wiki uses the word "clean" (not the same as "clear") when it talks about a quick way to empty a disk by formatting it. If a disk was already empty, then it has an empty filesystem, whether it was newly formatted to get that way, or whether all files were deleted or moved from it. And the only reason the disk has to be empty is because the script doesn't want you to accidentally clear a disk that has files on it. Doing it with dd as you are it doesn't matter at all what is on the disk. Quote
sbu Posted May 6, 2020 Author Posted May 6, 2020 Yeah, I also rebooted prior to the format and moved some shares from including all to including specific disks (without the one I am trying to remove from the array). Those are more likely culprits. Quote
trurl Posted May 6, 2020 Posted May 6, 2020 If you had other write activity on the array then of course that would be competing with trying to clear the array disk, since both would be updating parity. The whole point of clearing the md device is so parity will be updated to stay in sync with all those zeros when clearing the disk. Then it can be removed without affecting parity since all the zeros have no effect on parity. Quote
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