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I have 5x 5TB 5400 RPM Seagate BarraCuda 2.5" 15mm disks that I've setup as RAID-5 to provide a usable storage space of 20 TB. I'm using the SoftRAID v6.1 b1 recently released for Monterey 12.0 Beta for beta testing. I started a Validation on this RAID-5, and at first it was reporting zero "blocks updated". After maybe 6 hrs the "blocks updated" started to increment repeatedly, and have now reached some 297,475,631, and it just keeps incrementing constantly.
I understand that this can be normal for correcting the parity data, but I'm wondering if because there are so many "blocks updated", something is badly wrong with this RAID-5 device unit.
The SoftRAID log show no error messages. It simply posted "The volume "<volume name> has started validating. Incorrect blocks will be updated."
Can I assume all is well or not ?
Thank you.
Topic starter
Posted : 11/06/2021 2:59 am
FYI... I had written some 4.6 TB to this RAID-5 prior to starting the Validation.
Topic starter
Posted : 11/06/2021 3:15 am
Change volume optimization to Workstation. You probably have it set to Digital Video, where the driver does not interrupt your work, as it pauses rebuild, or validate when you are using the computer. Workstation will validate constantly at 50% possible speed, so you can still work while you validate (but it would impact capturing video for example). I am pretty sure this is all that is going on.
Posted : 11/06/2021 10:07 am
Hi... it was setup for Workstation - stripe unit size: 16 KB. It's not affecting my work at all. I posted my observations simply because I was not understanding the meaning of "blocks update".
Topic starter
Posted : 11/06/2021 10:20 am
Do "blocks updated" mean SoftRAID has made adjustment corrections, and if so, why ? Thanks.
Topic starter
Posted : 11/06/2021 11:10 am
I misunderstood your comment to be also complaining about IO counters not incrementing, sorry.
Blocks updated means when doing parity, it had to update the blocks. the first time you validate a volume, it will have lots of blocks to update, as parity on a SoftRAID volume is only calculated when a section is written to. (hardware RAID needs to do this in advance on the entire volume) So you will see lots of blocks being updated.
After that, you should never (or very rarely) see a block updated in a validate. The exception is SSD's, which because of TRIM will constantly have updated blocks, as they are "trimming" underneath the file system.
Posted : 11/06/2021 11:49 am
Thanks... so does this mean a RAID-5 should be completely Validated before ever writing to it, in order to obtain the best speeds when subsequently writing to it ?
Topic starter
Posted : 11/06/2021 12:03 pm
No, SoftRAID takes care of everything for you on this. No issues or performance differences
Posted : 11/06/2021 12:45 pm
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