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I have a SUPERMICRO server that I just looked at and it's got two red lights blinking on what is the two RAID 1 drives, where the OS is hosted. I was moving a 2.5GB file to a thumb drive and it looked like it was finished so I did safely remove hardware and unplugged the drive since it let me do it. Well, something made it not finish and when I logged in through the console I was told that file was lost. I also get a message from Chrome that the profile can't be found, but when I log into the same account remotely I don't get that message...?

These are the drives that make up the array. Windows also reports the "drive" as healthy, but I'm assuming it wouldn't be aware of the RAID...

I'm assuming the identically blinking red lights means that it's rebuilding the array. So, how long would it take to rebuild a 143GB array if the drives are 15K?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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It's not clear what you're asking... RAID 1 is just mirroring, so unless you replaced a failed drive, there's no "rebuilding" going on. – Ward Oct 20 '11 at 1:03
Yes, I know that, but I'm assuming that one of the drives "hiccuped" on something and the controller decided to rebuild the array. – Alex Oct 20 '11 at 1:06
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About as long as it takes to wind this piece of string into a ball. – John Gardeniers Oct 20 '11 at 3:51
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closed as not a real question by Ward, Scott Pack, Shane Madden, John Gardeniers, DJ Pon3 Oct 20 '11 at 9:11

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It depends.

All it needs to do is read all the data from one drive and write it to the other - which is a basic function of the throughput of the drives on sequential read and write.

However, the disruption to that simple formula is the fact that the drives still have an OS to run. Any disk activity that the OS wants to throw at the array is likely taking precedence over the rebuild activity, taking up I/O time and forcing seeks of other data in between sequential activity for the rebuild.

The same RAID rebuilding on an idle system versus an extremely busy and I/O heavy system could easily differ in rebuild time by an order of magnitude.

I'd check into the RAID controller's status, if possible - I'm unsure of what the blinking lights mean on your device, but you'll want to check that a rebuild is indeed occurring without issue.

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