RAID Initialization

  • Hello. I am in the process of setting up RAID6 with five 8TB WD Red drives. I just created the RAID6 array and got a prompt that says "Please wait until the RAID has been initialized before creating a file system". Does this mean to wait until it finishes resyncing? Right now it says "clean, resyncing" under State, but it is just at 3.7%, so this might take a while. Do I need to wait for this to finish in order to create the file system or can it be done right after initial creation of the RAID6 array while it is still resyncing? Thank you.

  • Right now it says "clean, resyncing" under State, but it is just at 3.7%, so this might take a while


    Exactly. Why do you think you should ignore "Please wait until the RAID has been initialized before creating a file system"


    Honest question since your answer can outline whether you need RAID or not. If you do the whole thing to just get a 'good feeling' (I spent some more money and did something with redudancy and now my data is protected) you're doing it 100% wrong.

  • Exactly. Why do you think you should ignore "Please wait until the RAID has been initialized before creating a file system"


    Honest question since your answer can outline whether you need RAID or not. If you do the whole thing to just get a 'good feeling' (I spent some more money and did something with redudancy and now my data is protected) you're doing it 100% wrong.

    First of all, I was not thinking about or choosing to "ignore" the warning. I am doing my due diligence and asking in the forum so that I can get better information from people more knowledgeable in OMV. The reason I asked is because, in my experience, the terms initialization and resyncing are different. A simple change of a term in one of the areas may provide more clarity, such as "clean, initializing". I have used disk redundancy, be it RAID or similar, on a personal level for over 10 years and in IT work for much longer than that. Some current alternatives will let you create a file system and start adding files at the same time the array is initializing.


    In any case, for some reason I have not confirmed, the initialization process hung last night and the drives spun down after this, leaving everything at about 31%. This means it pretty much ran all night. The process has now resumed.

  • the terms initialization and resyncing are different


    True, but mdraid (which is the basis when you choose RAID-6) doesn't differentiate. Though mdadm folks have an own opinion on RAID-6 initial resync: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/i…y_Creation#--assume-clean (I don't know what's correct in the wiki there since I'm no mdraid user and am also not that happy that an awful lot of OMV users use it)


    Some current alternatives will let you create a file system and start adding files at the same time the array is initializing


    Yep. And the more intelligent ones do all this parity stuff at the filesystem layer or at least above the block device layer so unlike mdraid there is never the need to 'resync' huge blockdevices consisting only of zeroes at creation or time.

  • Thank you both for your input. I changed the speed limits and believe that helped a little, especially during the second half of the process. The array finished initializing but I still have not set a file system. What I am working on right now is trying to get the drives to spin down as selected. The built-in system (believe it's hdparm) seemed a bit inconsistent in the results. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Other times it only worked on random drives.


    I am trying hd-idle, which seemed to be working correctly at first, but I am running into the issue of when drives are spun up again, they will not be spun down again. However, sometimes two or three of them do spin down. I believe I am missing "step d" in the tutorial, which refers to this script. I honestly have no idea where and how to add this script. Any pointers are appreciated. In the hd-idle tutorial there is another script made by the OP, but I believe it does not apply in my case as I am not using autoshutdown at this time.



    Thanks again!

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