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initialize new 4x4TB X-RAID very slow takes 157 hours?
Hi, I purchased a new ReadyNas 214 and updated to the latest firmware 6.10.0. Added 4x 4TB disks from a set of Seagate external drives and created a fresh X-RAID volume, which is actually RAID 5.
So I am looking at the progress panel, it says it will take more than 157 hours to resync? That's pretty crazy! Does it really take 1 week to initialize raid?!?
While RN214 is building raid, even the web gui is none responsive, so I cannot even create an id and a share to start using the NAS. Is this normal?
ctny wrote:
In QNAP, I have 3x 8TB WD80EMAZ-00M9AA0.
In ReadyNas, I have 4x 4TB ST4000DM000.
The WD80EMAZ are rebranded WD Red drives. Though of course they have no warranty, they should perform identically to normal Reds.
The ST4000DM000 was the original version (which goes back to about 2013). Did you shuck old USB drives?
I guess there are two basic options
- wait for the resync to complete, and then take a good look at the logs - particularly disk health. I'd suggest using ssh (smartctl -x for example)
- Interrupt the resync, and test the disks - ideally with Seatools in a Windows PC.
Although the web ui isn't responsive, you might try getting the logs with RAIDar - https://kb.netgear.com/20684/ReadyNAS-Downloads
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ctny wrote:
So I am looking at the progress panel, it says it will take more than 157 hours to resync? That's pretty crazy! Does it really take 1 week to initialize raid?!?
Setting up the RAID does require doing 16 TB of disk I/O - reading or writing every sector of the data volume. It doesn't matter if the sector is free space or used. So it can take a while.
But it shouldn't take a week. What model disks are you using? The ST4000DM004 is SMR drive (Shingled Magnetic Recording) - and if you are using SMR then the estimate is likely correct (or even low).
SMR drives are ok for archival, but aren't really a good fit for NAS use. Sustained write speeds are be very slow, because writing track x destroys track x+1. So the disk needs to "ripple" the writes until it reaches the end of the drive (or a reserved unused track). That is,
- read X+1
- write X
- read X+2
- write X+1
- read X+3
- ...
ad nauseum.
They have a large cache , and they will re-order pending writes to minimize the impact of the ripple. But if you're writing a lot of data, the speed becomes glacial. I did a full format of a 5 TB SMR drive a little while ago in a Windows PC - it took a few days to complete.
You are better off using NAS-purposed drives (WDC Red or Seagate Ironwolf) in your NAS. If you want to shuck a USB drive, the best option right now is to use a WD Easystore as they use white-labeled WDC Reds.
ctny wrote:
created a fresh X-RAID volume, which is actually RAID 5.
X-RAID uses standard RAID modes (in your case RAID-5 and RAID-1). If your disks were different sizes (say 2x2 + 2x3) it would have created multiple RAID groups (a 4x2 TB RAID-5 group and an 2x1TB RAID-1 group), and joined them together to get a single 7 TB volume.
So it just happens to be simpler in your case, when creating an array with disks of equal size. If you want to expand the size later on, you'd upgrade two disks to bigger ones. The capacity rule is "sum the disks and subtract the largest".
StephenB, Thanks for the reply.
When the raid is initializing, the web GUI is almost non-responsive. It takes a long time to just login on the web, and often moving between the screens just times out. Even the volume screen is not updating now, so I can't see progress on the web page, thus I don't know how much time is left now. I tried to create a share, but tried 3 times, looks like it didn't work (due to screen timeout?). The NAS is essentially useless during this period. Is this normal expectation?
In contrast, I have a QNAP 328 with 3x 8TB drives (disks from shucking) also. Building the RAID 5 took a few seconds to start, then the initializing job ran at a low priority, so maybe it took a week to finish as well, but I was able to copy files, access it like normal, and the GUI behaved normally, so I didn't even notice it was initializing... Is there a way to adjust the initialization job on ReadyNas too?
ctny wrote:
When the raid is initializing, the web GUI is almost non-responsive. It takes a long time to just login on the web, and often moving between the screens just times out. Even the volume screen is not updating now, so I can't see progress on the web page, thus I don't know how much time is left now. I tried to create a share, but tried 3 times, looks like it didn't work (due to screen timeout?). The NAS is essentially useless during this period. Is this normal expectation?
It will get sluggish during the RAID build, but I don't think the RN214 should become completely non-responsive.
Again, I suspect you are using SMR drives. Seagate switched over to SMR in the ST4000DM004 in 2017 ( https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/seagate-barracuda-3-5-4tb-st400dm004-now-using-smr-platters-with-2tb-per-platter-capacity.2523565/ ). If you are using them, you will see poor performance. Lowering the priority of the task won't fix it - the bottleneck is the drives themselves. Once the drive cache becomes full, the performance drops to a crawl. Though this performance graph is for a different SMR model, it will give you some idea of what's going on: https://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
So, what drive models are you using (and maybe also share what you are using on the QNAP)?
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