[BLOG] My RAID5 Adventure
So, up until Wednesday this week, I was happily cruising along on a 3x640GB RAID5 setup.
Then, my two new 640GB drives (black friday, heh) got here on Thursday. Excited as I was to get them set up and double my transfer speeds, I immediately installed them and started the capacity expansion process. The next morning, it had finished, and I rebooted my PC, expecting windows to reappear post-haste.
What happened then? My computer booted up off the floppy drive. Erm, that wasn't supposed to happen.
I delved into the BIOS and the bootup settings looked good, so I checked the ICH10R controller BIOS settings. It reports my RAID5 is using 5 disks, is healthy, and is not bootable. At this point, I'm having a serious "what the fuck?" moment.
I jumped on the internet on my other PC, and after some googling, discovered the problem. Adding two extra data drives at 640GB each to the array had made the combined total array size 4x640GB, or around 2.3TB. It seems that arrays that exceed 2TB are just not bootable on ICH raid.
Now, I have an empty external 1TB hard drive, so backup and recovery isn't a huge problem, but picture this - my Steam folder alone weighs more than 400GB. After booting up from the Windows 7 install DVD and spending several hours at the command prompt, all my data was backed up. So I reboot, reset all drives to non-RAID, and then create two <2TB RAID5 arrays on the drives, thus solving the problem of too much space.
The problem? The Intel ICH10R controller performs a full parity initialization on an empty array when it's created. Since it's performing this initialization on two arrays on the same drives simultaneously, that process alone can easily take 24+ hours. This made restoring my backed up files slow as balls.
It is now 7:30PM on saturday night, and my PC is just finishing up the last little piece of the recovery - it's copying the operating system back into place. Transferring my 400GB Steam folder took just over 21 hours to complete. As of this moment, I still don't have a bootable gaming PC, and I'm praying that Windows startup repair will be able to re-create an appropriate MBR on the new partition.
Moral of the story? If you boot up from a RAID array, don't use dynamic capacity expansion to increase the array size over 2TB. This has been a lesson learned the (very) hard way.
Then, my two new 640GB drives (black friday, heh) got here on Thursday. Excited as I was to get them set up and double my transfer speeds, I immediately installed them and started the capacity expansion process. The next morning, it had finished, and I rebooted my PC, expecting windows to reappear post-haste.
What happened then? My computer booted up off the floppy drive. Erm, that wasn't supposed to happen.
I delved into the BIOS and the bootup settings looked good, so I checked the ICH10R controller BIOS settings. It reports my RAID5 is using 5 disks, is healthy, and is not bootable. At this point, I'm having a serious "what the fuck?" moment.
I jumped on the internet on my other PC, and after some googling, discovered the problem. Adding two extra data drives at 640GB each to the array had made the combined total array size 4x640GB, or around 2.3TB. It seems that arrays that exceed 2TB are just not bootable on ICH raid.
Now, I have an empty external 1TB hard drive, so backup and recovery isn't a huge problem, but picture this - my Steam folder alone weighs more than 400GB. After booting up from the Windows 7 install DVD and spending several hours at the command prompt, all my data was backed up. So I reboot, reset all drives to non-RAID, and then create two <2TB RAID5 arrays on the drives, thus solving the problem of too much space.
The problem? The Intel ICH10R controller performs a full parity initialization on an empty array when it's created. Since it's performing this initialization on two arrays on the same drives simultaneously, that process alone can easily take 24+ hours. This made restoring my backed up files slow as balls.
It is now 7:30PM on saturday night, and my PC is just finishing up the last little piece of the recovery - it's copying the operating system back into place. Transferring my 400GB Steam folder took just over 21 hours to complete. As of this moment, I still don't have a bootable gaming PC, and I'm praying that Windows startup repair will be able to re-create an appropriate MBR on the new partition.
Moral of the story? If you boot up from a RAID array, don't use dynamic capacity expansion to increase the array size over 2TB. This has been a lesson learned the (very) hard way.
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