Stop raid 5 rebuild without damage to disk?

realWasabi

October 21, 2012 12:45:46 PM

Hi!

I just bought a Qnap TS-869 along with 6 WD Red 3TB harddrives.

As it's the first time I'm setting up a raid 5 array, I wanted to make sure how it would work if I would need to do a rebuild or disk expansion some time. I therefore only installed 5 hard drives, got them up and running, and then added the 6th drive.

Now, the NAS starts rebuilding the array with the 6th drive just fine, but it's incredibly slow. After 8 hours, it's on 13%.

As this was just a test, and theres no data on the disks, I just want to stop the rebuild and start fresh with all drives instead. That process "only" takes about 10 hours or so to complete.

But being new to raid 5 arrays, my question is: Can I stop the rebuild mid-process without damaging the NAS or the drives?

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ss202sl

October 21, 2012 1:05:05 PM

Yes you can blow away the current configuration - even if its rebuilding. When you rebuild, it rebuilds the entire disk. It really doesn't know that there isn't any data, and adding a new drive is even more complicated because it has to level the data across 6 drives instead of 5, so it may take longer.

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realWasabi

October 21, 2012 1:56:54 PM

ss202sl said:

Yes you can blow away the current configuration - even if its rebuilding. When you rebuild, it rebuilds the entire disk. It really doesn't know that there isn't any data, and adding a new drive is even more complicated because it has to level the data across 6 drives instead of 5, so it may take longer.

Thank you for your answer.

Just to make sure you mean what I think you mean

If i just ssh'ed in and made it shutdown while it's rebuilding - the data (if there was any) would be gone, but the drive and nas wouldn't be damaged by it in any way?

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