RAID5 syncing and creating filesystem at the same time?

D

Dannermax

Hello all.

I have just set up OpenMediaVault on my Server with 4x3TB harddrives. I choose to run them in RAID 5, and after it had been synchronizing a couple of minutes I picked a filesystem for the RAID system. So now I had the filesystem initializing (4 harddrives) at the same time as the raid array was resyncing. After a short time the filesystem had been created, and the RAID was still being created: 500 some minutes left.. :)

Filesystem status is now:
Code: 
status is: Online
Mounted: No
Used: N/A
And so on...

So my question is, have I compromised the creation of the RAID5 array or was it safe to do what I did?

I'm asking, because I want this RAID5 to work perfectly, so that I can get my data back in case of a faulty harddrive, and I have little knowledge of what I'm doing so I want to be super-sure :)

I also tried installing sabnzbd plus from this page:

http://myhpmicroserver.com/wiki/Ins...d_and_Subsonic_On_Debian_Squeeze#Introduction

onto my USB thumbdrive (which acts as my main harddrive, and the installation got stuck at 10pct. Dont know if that has anything to do with the raid being created.. but again, i want to be absolutely sure that it is done correctly.

Last question: Can the s.m.a.r.t feature, tell me if the raid is working as it should, after it has been set up?

Thanks for reading my post.. :)

Daniel
 
OpenMediaVault is not based on FreeBSD, so I doubt many people have definite answers here. However, normally it is safe to use a storage device as soon as the OS makes it available to you, even if it still does things with it behind your back (e.g. verifying RAID parity or whatnot). Maybe the Debian folks know more about this, it's based on their distro after all. I suspect it simply uses mdadm as its RAID system, so you could verify RAID integrity with that one and if that checks out, fsck the filesystem on top of that.

Here we only deal with GEOM, ZFS and UFS ;)
 
Thanks for your reply @Sfynx. I meant FreeNAS, not FreeBSD :) I will try to verify with fsck as you suggested.

Again, thanks!
 
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