I've since upgraded hardware that supports it, and am trying to use these drives now. I tried to add them to freenas zpool a few years ago, and when they formatted, they formatted weird because the raid controller did not recognize 3 tb drives I think they showed up as 2.2 tb or something. Particularly with the Perc H700.I am trying to format some new drives (initialize them). I'm still interested to know if anyone else can share their personal experience with raid build times. I hate to throw that much stress on the drives but it might be worth it to satiate my curiosity. I suppose once this is done (hopefully by next week!) I could break the raid and throw in my spare drive and let it rebuild then compare the times. I just assumed that a fast initialization would be like a quick format of a hard drive. Maybe the dozen or so I've done over the years have always taken this long. Maybe in the past I've never paid attention to the rebuild status. Maybe I didn't actually pick fast init (though as northland pointed out if i hadn't picked it then the controller should not have presented the array to me to use). I figured for both 5 and 10 the rebuild process would mean resyncing all the sectors on the drives, whereas a recreation/fast initialization would mean starting with 0 and only syncing the newly added data. But I didn't think the type of RAID was important in this case. Right, I do remember him mentioning he uses RAID 5. So I am open to just about any suggestion anyone might have. Right now the server is merely acting as a replication server so I am not opposed to wiping the RAID and trying something else to see the results. Am I wrong in thinking that a recreation instead of a rebuild should be quicker and put a lot less strain on the drives?

The OS is working, just not as fast as I am used to.Р”Р€. Is there something wrong with my drives? OpenManage shows no errors on any of them. Should I have picked 'Start init' instead of 'Fast init' and just let the RAID build on it's own? That doesn't seem to be right according to this article:Р”Сћ. But here I am, 48+ hours later with less than half the initialization complete.Р”РЋ. I was under the impression that fast init would be much faster - I could swear in the past that that has been the case. So it seems to have slowed down progressively as the hours go on. Come this morning I check the raid status and it's only at 42%. This didn't quite feel right but I figured at the rate it was going it would be done close to Monday morning so I shrugged it off. So I checked the raid status and found it was only at 23 percent. Saturday afternoon I noticed the server wasn't quite working as quick as I was used to. I rebooted, installed the OS and things seemed fine. I created the array (Raid 10, 6x2tb sata Dell certificateР”Вrives) Friday night around 11pm, choosing fast init so I could start using the array while it was initializing. Instead of replacing the drive itself I decided to go the route of recreating the array instead of rebuilding.

Last week a drive failed on the RAID 10 array of a Perc H700 in a Poweredge T610.

However if anyone else can shed some light on the issue I'm having it's much appreciated. I'm tagging Robert5205 specifically because in the past I've seen him say that instead of replacing a drive in a failed and letting it rebuild he destroys the array and recreates it with the new drive - thus saving the drives from the heavy load that comes with a rebuild.

Avago initialize drive