Can someone with a 30 Gig toshiba drive tell me about how long a drive check normally takes. I recently added a 30G to my 12G empeg and fsck times have gone from 3-4 minutes to at least 15-20. Other than that the drive seems fine and I just wanted to get an idea if this is about right. I guess I am used to two or three minute fscks for the 50 gig RAID in my server, but this seems rather high.

-Mike

Remember that RAIDs will be faster than the same amount of storage on one disk, because you're reading data in parallel. After all, that's one of the selling points of RAID (in addition to better chances of disaster recovery).

Can't tell you if your times are normal for 12+30, though - I run a single 20 (and I've never timed a fsck).

Remember that RAIDs will be faster

Of course, and I realize that the empeg uses relatively slow laptop drives on a relatively slow bus. I am just surprised that the times increased so much going from 12G to 42G. A RAID is of course not an accurate comparison, but I was really trying to compare my empeg with a single 12G drive to my empeg with two drives and I noticed that the time increased by nearly a factor of 10.

So what I was wondering is if the second drive may be faulty or if the slowdown is because it is having to swap to fsck the larger drive or if it is something else entirely.

-Mike

I haven't timed it exactly... but that seems about right. I have an IBM 12 and 30 and the checks seem to take about that long.

The bigger the drive, the more it will swap during a fsck, whcih means it won't necessarily be a linear increase.

Note also that you need to format with -i131072 -m0 -s1 (sparse superblocks and not many inodes) - this is what the builder does and will make the fscks faster, apart from giving you more space on the drive to play with.

Hugo