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Sigh. How the times change. Right now I'm looking at 2 days to rebuild my NAS array after adding another 10TB disk.

True, that's some things have changed.

But it's when you consider taking first full drive backup times. It still takes 'forever' when you'd rather like to get on with fixing single disk issues. Or like when you wait RAID rebuilds too.

We did plan our maintenance tasks so, that there was something else useful we could do while obligatory backup and Spinrite was running. Upgraded another devices EPROM's, PC BIOS or dot matrix printer EPROM, cleaned printer heads, chaff and dust from chassis, changed colour ribbon to it. Ran updates to software we had sold etc. And went lunch with the customer:)

It turned into 5 days. After realising I'd forgotten to change the block size to 4096 and it was horribly slow, I yanked the drive out, tried with my utility to set it to 4096 bytes and failed, found another utility that did the job, put the drive back in, wait 3 days for it to rebuild the array without the new disk, and then another two days to add the disk back in. Sigh.

Still, with 4k block sizes, it goes like shit off a shovel.

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