Re: Adding disks to a raid set, how long is too long?

Rob,

I've seen that quickly to 99%, long time to finish on my VIOS-presented
LUNs. Maybe because of the storage controller's cache or in this case the
SSD's? In any case i don't trust any DST disk % indicator anymore, not
since a power5 machine where 120 minutes for initialization were really 281
minutes...

Best Regards,

Roberto


On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 9:04 AM, <rob@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well, the third Power 8 finished Raid fine. No quick jump to 99% and
hang. Instead it slowly (like about 1 percent every 5 minutes) counted
up.
Of course, that one had spinning disks instead of SSD's like the other two
Power 8's.

I had aborted the raid on one after only about 8 hours. It took a long
time (went home and saw it in the morning) to boot into DST off of DVD.
DST shows no way to see status of raid. Well, in a roundabout way...
'display page data' or some such thing shows all but 2 disks are in raid.
So, do I assume that the other two are the hot spares? For kicks I tried
to start raid but it has no more disks to start raid on. Not going too
far until IBM tells me what to do next.

However my confidence in my abilities shot up through the roof. The
machine I cabled myself is farthest along.


Rob Berendt
--
IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1
Group Dekko
Dept 1600
Mail to: 2505 Dekko Drive
Garrett, IN 46738
Ship to: Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com





From: rob@xxxxxxxxx
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07/09/2014 08:42 AM
Subject: Re: Adding disks to a raid set, how long is too long?
Sent by: "MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



Well, I just fired up another Power 8. This one has 34 SSD's. Once
again, it got to 99% lickety split. I'll give this one some time. On
this one we're using a special 720-RSC disc. We'll see if that behaves
any different.

Two consultants sitting around with another one waiting to arrive...
"Did you bring your clubs?"

And the third Power 8 is waiting for IBM to come replace the backplane,
etc. Unlike the other two, which came racked, this one was "customer
installable" with a box taped shut with a label about only being opened by

IBM and I had to rack and cable it myself. Kind of shakes your confidence

in yourself.


Rob Berendt
--
IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1
Group Dekko
Dept 1600
Mail to: 2505 Dekko Drive
Garrett, IN 46738
Ship to: Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com





From: DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 07/09/2014 08:09 AM
Subject: Re: Adding disks to a raid set, how long is too long?
Sent by: "MIDRANGE-L" <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx>



Rob,

You implied that these are internal disks not SAN based.
So with that I
would say that anything over a couple hours is an error. With SAS as you
certainly know building the RAID sets is a fair bit faster than it 'twas
on SCSI. 600GB Spinnys are a couple of hours so.....

My vote: Too Long!

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 7/9/2014 7:32 AM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Around 12:30pm Tuesday July 8 I started adding a couple dozen new

?775?gb

SSD's to a new raid set on a new lpar on a power 8. Didn't take long to
get to 99% done. However it's been sitting at 99% since. It's now

7:30am

on Wednesday July 9. What, nineteen hours later? While working on
another pmr with IBM they acknowledged that the 99% is a joke based on
much smaller drives.


Rob Berendt

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