Re: RAID 6 rebuild time - can I slash it?

Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Wed, 19 Mar
2014 16:29:52 GMT:

On a Saturday of my choosing, our HW service provider is going
to take our System i 520 from 2 8-drive RAID 5 sets to 2
8-drive RAID 6 sets w/hot spare.

Wow! This is quite a change in data protection.

You realize that in order to have your data at risk, you need to
lose 2 drives in the RAID6 array?

Generally, I recommend to customers to do RAID5 + hot spare or
RAID6. I see it as more importante to have as many disk units
as possible for RAID6 versus adding the tiny bit of reduced
delay time for rebuild to begin on a single failed drive that is
provided by hot spare.

Time to create the RAID6 arrays is mostly dependent on the size
of the drives. Other factors are whether there is data on them
or not (% full is irrelevent) and the type of disk controller.