On 2013-04-11, David C. Miller <millerdc at fusion.gat.com> wrote: > > Just for reference, I have a 24 x 2TB SATAIII using CentOS 6.4 Linux MD RAID6 with two of those 24 disks as hotspares. The drives are in a Supermicro external SAS/SATA box connected to another Supermicro 1U computer with an i3-2125 CPU @ 3.30GHz and 16GB ram. The connection is via a 6Gbit mini SAS cable to an LSI 9200 HBA. Before I deployed it into production I tested how long it would take to rebuild the raid from one of the hot spares and it took a little over 9 hours. I did a similar test on a 3ware controller. Apparently those cards have a feature that allows the controller to remember which sectors on the disks it has written, so that on a rebuild it only reexamines those sectors. This greatly reduces rebuild time on a mostly empty array, but it means that a good test would almost fill the array, then attempt a rebuild. I definitely saw a difference in rebuild times as I filled the array. (In 3ware/LSI world this is sometimes called "rapid RAID recovery".) In checking my archives, it looks like a rebuild on an almost full 50TB array (24 disks) took about 16 hours. That's still pretty respectable. I didn't repeat the experiment, unfortunately. I don't know if your LSI controller has a similar feature, but it's worth investigating. --keith -- kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us