Adding additional disk to RAID-5

[BCato]

I have an motherboard with an H67 chipset. A few days ago I setup a 3 2tb (Samsung) disk Raid-5. It took it probably a day to initialize. I then transferred about a terabyte of data to it and realized that I would probably need more space. I ordered another 2tb drive (samsung) and put plugged it up and added it to the array with Intel RST. It has gone to the "Migrating Data" phase. Initially it was very quick, probably 1% a minute up until it hit about 27%. It has now dropped to about .01% every 2-3 minutes. Nothing else is running on the computer the CPU is at 0-1% (Core i3 Sandy Bridge). I have rebooted the computer a couple times as well just to make sure nothing else could be hanging it up. Does it normally take this long to add another disk? at this rate it will probably take a week to migrate all of the data. Is there a way to give Intel RST more CPU to do what it needs to migrate the data?

[BCato]

I forgot to add that this is strictly a data drive, the OS is on a seperate drive.

[idata]

I am having the same issue as well. I would just copy everything off of the disk and delete the entire volume and start from scratch but since it is "migrating data" i am only getting about 5mbps when transferring data from the array to another independent disk. Anyone have a solution?

[idata]

Me too. My drives are 5400 and the processor an ION, but it's been running for almost 24 hrs now and has just reached 30%. The CPU is not loaded at all. This should be MUCH better.

[idata]

At the rate it was going it would have taken 2-3.5 months to move all of the data around. I ended up transferring all of the data off of the drives and just deleting the array and starting from scratch. the initialization only took 15 hours.

[idata]

This leads me to a question - why "initalize"? I couldn't stand the expansion wait anymore so like Brent112, I killed the array and re-made it with the extra drive already added. It seems to be working just fine, but in the IRST app the array is listed as "Initalized: No". Should I do it? What's the point\gain if I do?

[idata]

Yes you will want to initialize. Initializing sets up all of the data and parity blocks on the disk. It is not truly fault tolerant until you initialize. Not sure what would happen if you lost a drive when it is not initialized, but i sure wouldnt want to find out.

[idata]

K. I'll kick that off. Let's see how long THAT takes. :-)

[idata]

I have 4 2TB drives and it took 15 hours.

[idata]

I do as well (5400 RPM). I'll report back when done for interest's sake.

[idata]

24 hrs later: 66.93% complete.

[idata]

Just finished (4:46 pm ET). 29hrs 40 mins.