New Drive Formatting and Synchronization

[n2vwz]

The new hard drives arrived today (5 x WD Red 3TB) for my AT608T. I am presently in the process of creating a single Raid 6 volume. (Previously, I was testing with a single 330GB drive).

All is progressing as expected, but -- It's been formatting / synchronizing for a half hour and disk manager is providing the following information message:

Time Remaining: 3.0 Days Speed: 10 (MB/s).

This seems a bit slow - is this normal? How long should this operation take? For a while, the speed jumped up to 24 (MB/s) and 1.4 days, but it hangs mostly around 10 (MB/s).

Jim

[James.W@AST]

Hi Jim,

First of all, when the volume is in "Synchronization", that means you can start to use the NAS (file transfer, backup...anything) right away, no need to worry about that.

The reason why the sync process is not very fast:

In order to provide a better use experience, the system has a limitation on the sync speed so that it won't effect the other services, otherwise you may experience some slow performance while using the other services. Meanwhile, the system will dynamically adjust the sync speed just like what you have seen and try to finish it as soon as it can. When the system has more free resources, then it will increase the sync speed, in contrast, when the system is busy with something (e.g. you are reading/transferring file) then the sync speed will decrease automatically. However, the minimum speed will still 10 MB/s.

The actual time need for finishing it mainly depends on the volume size as well as the disk size. In the past, the drive size is relatively small (<1TB) so the sync process may only take several hours. But now, the common drive size is 2 to 4 TB, and the volume size can be really big such as 2X TB, so you can imagine the sync time will highly increase.

Again, don't worry about the sync speed and remain time, it's just a reminder which reflects what it's doing and the status, and basically you can simply ignore it.

[n2vwz]

10 hours later - It's 50% complete and syncing at 50 mB/s. Looking Good!