DL180 G6 with P410 - slow formatting

[Robert Bessems]

I have a new DL180 G6 with Windows Server 2008 - 32 bit and P410 raid 4x1Tb disks in Raid5+hot spare.
Whene ver trying to format the drives, it takes ages (well > 12 hours) for a 256 GB.
I had installed Windows 2003 server and this is much faster.

Any idea's

[Mark Woodruff]

What I've seen is that after you first plug in a drive, the controller insists on doing a surface scan. Until it's done, it takes forever to do anything. I ran some benchmarks. At first I was getting around 1mb/sec. I waited 24 hours, then I got 75+ mb/sec.

Patience...

[Jan Soska]

Hello,
probably also check how big cache do you have in your P410 array controller.

jan

[Robert Bessems]

The cache is 512 Mb.
Strange thing is that under Windows 2003 is much faster.

[rick jones]

Formatting a filesystem is primarily a "write" operation (as I understand it). If the cache is not battery of flash backed, the cache will not be used for writes and so will serve no purpose.

I was experiencing something similar installing Debian Lenny on a DL385 G2 (being one of the cobbler's children, most of my shoes are old :). I was tempted to dig-up how to enable the write cache even without a battery present, but ended-up just waiting.

If Windows 2003 formats much faster on the very same hardware, perhaps it either asks for the cache to be used even if not battery-backed, or it formats with fewer writes?