Rebuilding RAID set takes 2 hrs?

Don't know if this is the right place for my post ...
I have a 160gb Raid set (mirrored, 2 disk 160gb each), automatic rebuild). One disk failed, showing degraded in Disk Utility. After replacing the failed HD with a new one disk utility started to rebuild but it took 2hrs...... Is this normal.
I don't have any experience with RAID set and was wondering if this was normal.
Thanks
F
10.5.1
Powermac G5.
2 160GB external HD mounted as RAID mirrored (Mac OS X journaled extented)

Yes, that's normal -or, at least, not unusual.

Similar Messages

Problem Rebuilding RAID set with 10.5?

I have 1 RAID set (mirrored with autorebuild) composed of 2 (identical) HD. I got a message in 10.5 Disk Utility that one disk had failed and that the set was degraded.
I replaced the drive and I am getting an error message during the rebuild "Unrecognized filesystem".
I can still see and access my RAID set (1 slice still ok) so minimal damage here but I don't understand why I am getting this error message when trying to rebuild.
Any idea?
Thanks
setup:
-mirrored raid set
- autorebuild selected
- 2 slices (160Gb, GUI, OS journaled ext)

Hi VK2CPJ,
Today ( I slept on this idea was exhausted from previous day) tried on two blank eide drives in a raid box, no raid built just two independent drives, one set for master the other slave. A couple of observations:
I did not raid because I want one small partition to contain a Leopard boot install from the DVD. The message I received from disk utility was that if I restore that DVD my raid may be unusable(if I did raid). So I did not raid the drives but let them stand as master and slave. I wanted to do a APM on the small "boot" partition to see if my intel and PPC Mac would in fact boot from that restored Leopard DVD boot partition. I used start up pane on both PPC and intel and they would not boot up from that Leopard partition even though the start up pane showed the disk as a startup device. Using the option key booted both Macs. Now I'm not sure if doing this was to procedure because the Apple docs says to use a PPC Mac to do this process. Which I have a difficult time to understand. I'm assuming that the doc says that because APM would be default and assisting the user not to make any option mistake. So currently I'm trying this same procedure using a PPC Mac to test out whether start up pane will boot both Macs. I don't think it will but do think using option within the start up manager will work. If so then does this mean imply that the start up pane has a bug or that user does not require a PPC Mac to do the setup process. Let you know shortly.

Repairing RAID set takes a long time?

I have a 160gb Raid set (mirrored, 2 disk 160gb each), automatic rebuild). One disk failed, showing degraded in Disk Utility. After replacing the failed HD with a new one disk utility started to rebuild but it took 2hrs...... Is this normal.
I don't have any experience with RAID set and was wondering if this was normal.
Thanks
F
10.5.1
Powermac G5.
2 160GB external HD mounted as RAID mirrored (Mac OS X journaled extented)

Yes, It has to copy the entire master disk to the new slave disk plus keeping track of all changes to the master disk at the same time. It will go faster if no applications are running during the copy.

Rebuilding RAID set - need sanity check

I'm in the process of rebuilding a G5 used as a server that was built by a predecessor. It boots off two 250GB drives that are RAIDed. I don't have the password, so I attempted to change it using a Tiger install disk. Somehow booting off the DVD has destroyed the RAID set. I'm booting off a FW drive we use for diagnostics, and the drives show up in DiskUtility, but no RAID set up. if I do a 'sudo diskutil checkRAID' it says there's no RAID set to check.
If I list the drives they show up fine. Output (edited) is:
/dev/disk2
#: type name size identifier
0: Applepartitionscheme *233.8 GB disk2
1: Applepartitionmap 31.5 KB disk2s1
2: AppleDriverOpenFirmware 512.0 KB disk2s2
3: AppleBootRAID 233.8 GB disk2s3
/dev/disk4
#: type name size identifier
0: Applepartitionscheme *233.8 GB disk4
1: Applepartitionmap 31.5 KB disk4s1
2: AppleDriverOpenFirmware 512.0 KB disk4s2
3: AppleBootRAID 233.8 GB disk4s3
So the sanity check is this: If I run a repair mirror (sudo diskutil repairMirror disk2 disk4) will it wipe both drives or just rebuild the existing RAID setup?

oh and that message keeps popping up, even when I log out of the website. If I choose "cancel" everything now continues as it should.

Degraded RAID set (mirror)

I am running a pair of 2 GB external drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) using the OSX Disk Utility. Recently I noticed that the set shows it's RAID status as Degraded and one of the two drives is indicated as "Missing," which keeps the "rebuild raid set" button grey. However, I can verify each of them separately and they appear to be okay. Only one of the drives appears to be partitioned correctly; the "missing" drive simply shows a RAID slice for the entire 2 GB.
I would recreate the mirror set, except that I don't have anywhere to store the 1.3 GB still on the good drive, and I believe I cannot create the set again without erasing the contents. (I back up to the RAID set as well as use it for un-backed up storage, which I think is safe as long as the RAID set is working.)
Any ideas how to get the "missing drive" to reappear, so the system can rebuild the set? Or any other ideas to get out of this problem? Thanks.

It doesn't change the problem, but obviously I meant TB (not GB)

Automatically Rebuild RAID mirror set

In disc utility intalled a raid mirror set of two external drives. Later, after using the combined drive, I opened disc utility again and selected 'Automatically Rebuild RAID mirror set'. I didn't select that while installing the raid set, but did that afterwards. Later discovered that when reconecting a drive this would automatically update the drive again.
This option 'Automatically rebuild raid mirrir set' stays selected while in disc utility. However, when I close and later open disc utility again this option is deselected again. Is this normal? Or does this option remain active when selected and closing disc utility and is it just that disc utility assumes that I've removed/connected one or more drives in the mean time when starting disc utility again? Giving me the option to select it again manually in order to rebuild the raid mirror?

I believe you must enable that option when you create the RAID. The option does not remain enabled if you check it after the fact, at least it doesn't on my system either.
According to the DU Help:
If you are creating a mirrored RAID set, choose whether to rebuild disks automatically with the RAID Mirror AutoRebuild checkbox.
Message was edited by: Kappy

Snow upgrade & raid sets?

I am just about ready to upgrade my system to snow and was wondering if anyone else uses the mirrored raid config for backup drives? My question is what will happen to the raid set when I upgrade the OS? Having to rebuild it is a major pain in the *** and takes forever! I've had to find that out the hard way and learned its actually quicker to just copy all the data to a temp drive - rebuild the raid set from scratch - and then just copy back over all the data. But even that can take a very long time too. So will snow honor any existing raid sets on external drives or would it just be better for me to use the built-in time machine backup system?

I see what you mean, but I don't use my backup drives as a cloned bootable. I have another user on my system and therefore have it setup without permissions. Too many file permission issues for the other user if I don't! So I just use it for saving photos, docs, and other items I don't want to lose. The thing I love about RAID is once you set one up, that's it! All the cloning or mirroring is done automatically to the extra drive. With most other backup software I've used, you have to usually schedule a backup time which doesn't always work if the Mac is asleep or if you are logged out before the set time. So with a RAID, at least I know every single time something new is saved, it is immediately copied at the same exact time to the other drive as well.
So I don't know what you mean by unreliable? Shouldn't that be the perfect job for any backup system? To immediately clone one drive to another without delay? But my original question was about whether or not upgrading the OS would honor or maintain existing RAID sets. Instead of having to rebuild them.

Degraded RAID set help

Hello Support Community,
I have a 4 bay RAID set that all of a sudden is showing as degraded. I have two pairs of disks each striped, and then have those two pairs mirrored. Not sure if this is a correct RAID format, but it is what it is right now. So both striped sets say online, with no problems, but my mirrored set of those two pairs shows that it is degraded. See below.
Any thoughts as to what might be happening? I have the options set to automatically rebuild the RAID. How do I know this is happening? How long should I expect this to take? It's a 4TB raid in it's current config, and there is about 3.7TB of data on this RAID. I have everything backed up in two other locations. Am I better off starting from scratch? Or should I just let this thing run for 2 weeks and see what happens? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dave

No, I was doing all of this in disk utility. I left the arrary running overnight, and it's back online now. Not sure what got screwed up.
Thanks

Possible to increase the total size of a software raid set?

Hi,
I need to increase the size of a software raid set which is internally in one of the Xserves - originally it had 2x 400G drives.
I've swapped drives into the raid so they are both now 500G drives.
diskutil info drive XX (ie raid set) shows that the raid is still a 400G raid volume as expected.
Question is - can I grow the Raid Total Size to use all the capacity of the member volumes?
I guess the alternative is to remove the drives from the raid, enable raid on one of them and then add the other drive as a member... but this would mean I would have to take the raid offline.
The raid sets are not my system disks.
Any clues?
TIA
Campbell
XServes Mac OS X (10.4.5) 12 Macs & far too many PCs

Thanks for your help.
I rebuilt the array using enableRaid. Worked fine with Raid Volume offline for approx 5 minutes - although I had to degrade the array (and go bare with no mirror) twice in the process.
In case anyone is interested, this is what the process was:
1 Swap into Raid array larger drive (say, disk 2) and let array rebuild
2 Disable file services.
3 removefromraid disk 2 (leave it mounted).
4 Unmount the raid set and eject drives (say, disk 1) Remove drive - it's the only original backup.
5 enableRaid on disk 2
Providing enableRaid is ok -
6 Insert a fresh larger size drive in the place of the removed drive (disk 1)
7 Unmount new drive and addToRaid
8 (Rebuild array). Providing rebuilding ok -
9 Start file services again.
Data, permissions & ACLs were all intact. So now users can fill the rest of the raid up with more MP3s this week <sigh>
Maybe not the best approach but it worked well for me.
XServes Mac OS X (10.4.5) 12 Macs & several hundred too many PCs

Mac Pro 2009 Raid Set Lost after Hard Reboot

We have a newer Nehalem based Mac Pro with a 2009 Black Apple Hardware Raid card. The Hard Drive Configuration is: 4 x 2TB Western Digital drives setup as a Raid 1+0 array providing 4TB of space with what we believed to be optimal performance and redundancy. We had two volumes / partitions configured on the array, one 120GB for the OS and the remaining 3.8TB for data.
Everything was working fine when the server froze up. ON the Screen an error message said there is a problem with your Raid controller, Please open Apple Raid Utility.. Unfortunatly when we tried to do that we just got a spining beachball. We tried to open finder and it beachballed. We tried to force quit and nothing working. Finally we were left with no choice but to do a hard restart of the server and turn the machine off and then back on.
When the server came back on it would not boot up. We were greeting with the Folder with a Queston Mark. We booted from the Mac 10.6 Snow leopard Server Disk and opened up Apples Raid utility software. Much to our shock the Raid Set and the two Volumes were not shown in the Utility. However all 4 of the drives were listed and all being shown as Green light good status, but listed as "Roaming". We weren't sure what to do, the volumes weren't accesible since they didn't exist, the Raid set wasn't there, there was no way to run something like Data Rescue Recovery software. We tried calling Apple and have to wait until they open this morning. After looking online at various forums we came accross this problem with no solutions. Most of the people with the problems had the older 2006 Blue Raid card, and this appeared to be a common issue amoung others with the older card. I decided to try and re-create the Raid 1+0 set. However as soon as I did that I was prompted by Raid Utility that the drives I was selecting to use for the Raid set were already a part of another raid set and using them would delete the data on the set. I obviously canceled the process. Crazy enough the system knows the drives belong to a Raid set but doesn't realize it should know what the raid set information is.
We were using Mac OS 10.6.7 Snow Leopard Server, and I even tried installing and updating an external drive with 10.6.7 Server and booted from the drive from the machine and try to run Raid Utility. That did not work either. Any advice from anyone would be awesome. I'm worried what Apple is going to say when I do get a hold of them, the system is under Apple Care warranty. Thanks in advance for anyone's time.

I haven't lost data, but in my 2010 Mac Pro with 2009-vintage Apple RAID card, it has this Really Annoying Habit of constantly losing Disk 3 (the spare) in my 4x2 TB internal RAID5 array whenever I have to do a hard reboot.
I keep having to re-mark the now-"Roaming" drive as a Spare and then wait 8+ hours for it to rebuild the array ... grrr.
I saw an Apple KB article that suggests removing the Roaming disk and re-inserting it. Duh. Fat lot of good that did. Really wish there was some answer to this issue ... hard reboots should NOT cause array disks to go from "Assigned"/good to "Roaming"!

Macbook Pro with Dual hard drives. Scratch Disk, Memory 64bit, Raid, Set Up Questions.

Hello, this is my first post.
I just upgraded from the original 2006 17" Macbook Pro to a refurbished 13" Macbook Pro 2.53GHZ 4GB Ram (2009 model).
I bought the MCE Tech Optibay and installed it (if you dont know anything about it, ask me, its amazing.) So now I have 2x 500GB 7200RPM Seagate hard drives installed.
I am running Snow Leopard, CS3, Lightroom 1.4.
I have the main hard drive set up with Snow Leopard and all the Applications. I keep all my files on external firewire 800 drives, except files I am currently working on.
The second hard drive is set up as a scratch disk for Photoshop CS3 and that is it.
I am looking to upgrade to CS5 and Lightroom 3 here within this month or so. Or if I get anxious, tomorrow, haha.
I want to know the best setup I can do with my current set up with CS3 and for my future setup with CS5.
Any info will appreciated.
-Would some kind of raid set up with my internal drives be better? How does raid work with scratch disks?
-If I upgrade to 8GB memory in my macbook pro, would I even see a difference in performance if I didn't have a scratch disk? Since CS5 and Snow Leopard can use more memory in 64bit.
I think thats all I have on my brain right now. I may have more questions, or I can guarantee I will have more later.
Thanks alot.

First the scratch. Like you said, most everyone has a different take on scratch discs but I'd guess you're wasting one heck of a lot of hard drive space using all 500 GB for Scratch, did I read that right? If I did read it correctly YES, partition it and get some use out of it!!
I've got a unibody MBP 2.93GHz, OS 10.5.8, CS3 & PS 5 (running in 32bit mode), and 8 gigs of ram. I've partitioned the one 300 GB drive so 50GB is scratch, the other partition is for OS, & Apps, and documents (images).
I use LR 2 first than export to PS 5 to finish up. My photos get to be 300MB to 500MB in size and both versions of PS work on this setup just fine. Using PS 5 in 64 bit mode is faster opening files but NON of my plugin's are 64 bit yet, that's why I'm still stuck in 32 bit mode.
Not knowing what size or kind of files you work on makes giving advice a bit tough but try setting the status indicator (don't know the right name for it) in the bottom left corner of any PS open file to "Efficiency" and watch what happens when you process your files. I rarely see mine drop below 90%, I've got the usable RAM in PS Prefs set to it's max suggested, cut way back on History and Cache.
Can't wait for NIK and others to offer their plugin in 64 bit, later this year is what I was told.
There used to be an old "rule of thumb" with old version of PS about Scratch disc size. I don't remember exactly but it may have been 3 to 5 times the size of your biggest file??
Good luck, Alan

How can I temporarily remove a RAID set but keep the data?

I recently had to restore my Netgear ReadyNAS to factory settings, which meant that I needed to make a backup of its data and restore it afterwards. The only possible way to back up the 8.5Tb of data was to get 9Tb of WD Red disks and somehow use them - so my immediate thought was that the Mac Pro would be a good idea. I t had four drives in it, but three of them were not being used by the OS so they could be temporarily removed.
So I replaced three of my four Mac Pro drives with new 3Tb drives and used Disk Utility to set them up as a JBOD. I then used this JBOD drive to back up the NAS and restore it again after I had re-installed its O/S (the whole thing took two weeks!!!).
So now I'm in the following situation:
* I want to tear down the JBOD set and take the three new drives out of the Mac Pro again and replace them with the drives I normally use there so that I can go back to making music (which is what I usually use it for).
* I also want to be able to put the new drives back in and read the data as a JBOD again if needed (in case anything is discovered to be amiss with my ReadyNAS backup/restore operation) - let's say for the next month I'll plan to keep the old drives around for safety.
How can I remove the JBOD set in such a way that I can set it up again using the same drives, and access the data (i.e. I don't want to delete the RAID set the usual way because that will delete the data too - apparently...)?

Going to ask the mods to move this to MacPro, Hatter can answer your question, but I'm pretty sure if you power down and remove the RAID drives, you can put them in back again and boot up and the RAID will still be recognized as the info is stored on the drives themselves in the GUID/MBR of each drive in the set.
Also you should know, there is a new MacPro coming and it doesn't accept internal drives, only external.
So you should prepare and have some sort of external hardware redundancy for your data that isn't dependent on the Mac HFS+ formatting as Windows doesn't read that.
Perhaps exFAT would be better as both platforms can read/write that, but if the drives are going to be used with a PC ever, they need to be formatted by Windows for exFAT to get it right. Check first before you commit to copying huge data over.
Anyway research it, because if your MacPro dies, you might be up the creek and have some issues getting at all that data since it's in a RAID, external options might not work correctly or reliably for RAID.
Also consider talking to the fellows at MacGuru's, they are external RAID box setup experts for Mac's, sounds like you need a RAID 5 box, gives redundancy and can connect to any computer.
Hardware RAID is more reliable than software ones, cross platform as well.
good luck.

Offline Disc In Degraded Mirrored RAID Set

I have a 2 disc (300GB each) mirrored RAID set that has worked fine up until recently. One slice appeared failed so I attempted to rebuild it. 7 hours later it still showed up as failed. I attempted a rebuild once more and the same result. I then shut everything down and re-booted my whole system. Now the RAID set is still degraded but the slice now shows up as offline as opposed to failed.
I checked the connections and it's all connected fine.
I have run First Aid several times and no repairs were necessary.
Anyway I can get this back 'online'?
If not, can I delete it, repair it and if it's repaired add it back to the RAID set?

It sounds like one of the drives in the mirrored set has lost its mind (i.e., failed).
This is exactly the situation Mirrored RAID is good for.
Remove the failed drive, insert your spare drive of the same or larger size, and assign it as a spare. Then you should be able to get the RAID to rebuild onto the spare and bring it up to date in the next half-a-day or so. Then the mirror will show as working again.
Make sure your Backup is up-to-date. A second failure now (before the array has rebuilt) will give you data loss.

Suggestion for fixing broken raid set

Jesus. Again. Twice in 6 months. Raid set failure.
2:58pm today : Drive 3:50014ee2aede46eb missing - Previous drive status was inuse
2:59pm today : Degraded RAID set RS1
2:59pm today : Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
Jesus...
After launching the Raid Utility, I notice that one drive is actually missing from the drive bays.. Its just gone, and I have not done anything to it. This happened last December as well. Hard booting the drive (pull out, push back in) worked last time to get the drive online, but jesus. Twice? I should maybe replace the drive? I am using Apple Raid Card, people say it turns to be pretty strict about the drives state, but why the **** it keeps disappearing from the system?!
I was already on the phone with one Apple consultant about this, and I think everything is pretty OK. I have good backups, and gladly, the OS RAID set is ok. Only our accounts and work files were in there, and all is secured. But this is really stressful.. Feels like I can't trust these drives one bit. And they are good drives, standard hardware what comes with Mac Pro.
Just when I was starting to think that everything is finally working smoothly..
Any recommendations about how to act now. I know what I have to do but, it would be encouraging if I would get some steps to how to fix it. Working order etc.
Everything works tho, taking one separate set of backups at the moment just in case. I just need to get my act together and fix it. God I am annoyed tho.
Good weekend to everyone tho. Comments are appreciated.

Yeah, I already ordered a new drive.
I can't do any tests for the bad drive cos it just disappeared from the system totally. I guess it could come online if I hard boot it again (like when the raid set broke last december), but I don't feel like doing it before I get the new drive. Need to analyze it on another computer.
The consultant I talked with earlier mentioned that the RAID card is pretty strict about the condition of the drive. But I would like to know if that is why the drive keeps disappearing, if it really totally ejects it from the system . I heard that some cases the the Raid Utility just shows the red light what indicates the drive state if there is a problem, but for me the drive is just gone totally.
Hope that the new drive arrives soon. Will the Raid rebuild itself if I insert the new drive and mark it as global spare ? That's what I understood from reading the Raid Utility manual.

Degraded raid set now missing

I have or should I say had 2 250GB mirrored raid set. They would no longer boot I bought a new drive (same size) and attempted to rebuild the set. This went fine for a time but then failed. Now I can no longer see the raidset. I have tried booting from the server CD and it will stay booted just long enought to show me the raid set is gone or to open terminal then it shuts itself down.
I desperately need the data on this server. My most recent backup to tape was the end of January.
G5 Server Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Both hard drives were ruined by a power surge.

Rebuilding RAID set takes 2 hrs?

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