On 2011-05-19 Kevin McGregor wrote:
I installed Ubuntu Server 10.04.2 LTS AMD64 on a HP ProLiant ML370 G3 (4 x dual-core/hyperthreaded Xeon 2.66 GHz, 8 GB RAM) and I used the on-board SCSI controller to manage 8 x 300 GB 15K RPM SCSI drives in a software RAID 5 set up as a 7-drive array with 1 hot-spare drive. All drives are the exact same model with the same firmware version.
It's currently rebuilding the array (because I just created the array) and /proc/mdstat is reporting "finish=165.7min speed=25856K/sec". Does that sound "right" in the sense that it's the
I got around 20-30M/s or so on my RAID6 7200rpm 12TB 8-disk rebuild this week. That was on an old Pentium-D but with a nifty zippy new 8-port SATA card. Your speeds sound a touch slow, given the hardware. But RAID5/6 does weird things behind the scenes.
Note, if you're doing 8 drives anyhow, why not RAID6? Its survivability is much higher and its performance is surprisingly nearly that of RAID5 (there's some graphs somewhere I was recently looking at). The only downside is degraded performance sucks, but hopefully you will never be in that state (long). I've personally had/seen 2 RAID5 failures and will never use anything except RAID6 now.