Thread: Ubuntu 11.04 - Raid 5 (mdadm) Clunking?

hello everyone,

i'm still new ubuntu (giving second shot) please bare me. experiencing strange problem raid 5 (4x2tb disks) built using mdadm. reason 1 or more of dirves making clunking noise. not high pitched, rapid, click of death more low cha-chunk, cha-chunk every few seconds or so. think of sound when train goes ( not loud ) believe disk had them running in soft raid5 on window server 2003 without issues.

last time attempted raid 5 in ubuntu, getting same noise 12 hrs after start up. now, tends happen right after boot up. remember reading heads continually trying park or , that's may causing it. i've read fix situation, honest don't feel safe hacking system i've read bumping system after applying result in disk damage (unless can reassured).

have tuned raid's reserved block percentage 0% using tune2fs since going media storage drive if has baring on situation. haven't done else since raid finished building morning.

has ever experienced issue before? i'm not @ machine right can't provide specifics @ moment, post few things later if know you'd need see. sorry novel , !

- john

the train analogy pretty good, clickety clack, clickety clak, working on setting raid5 myself (4x2tb well) , getting same kind of clunking. i'm wondering if has parameters used create array, should have used bigger or smaller chunk size, software raid + filesystem tuning seems pretty dark art. find no decent sites gave straightforward recommendations without comments breaking down flame war)

drives should ok in case well, came out of old mythtv server had them in 2 raid 1 arrays, figured since new system around 10 times faster raid 5 ok (and i'd more space) clunking leaves me worried drive longevity.

i'd pick pair of 2tb's price of drives tripled overnight.

performance fine raid 5, have no idea read/write speed is, i've had 3 hd streams recording , 4 playing @ same time (family can't wait take on old beast)

doubt tune2fs setting has it, i'm using xfs myself.

have pointers?

code:

/dev/md0:          version : 1.2    creation time : fri nov 11 18:22:21 2011       raid level : raid5       array size : 5860532448 (5589.04 gib 6001.19 gb)    used dev size : 1953510816 (1863.01 gib 2000.40 gb)     raid devices : 4    total devices : 4      persistence : superblock persistent        update time : sun nov 13 00:53:50 2011            state : active   active devices : 4  working devices : 4   failed devices : 0    spare devices : 0             layout : left-symmetric       chunk size : 32k               name : mythtest:0  (local host mythtest)             uuid : 0231ddd3:cf6b17ba:b8c1eb4c:87d0089d           events : 20        number   major   minor   raiddevice state         0       8       17        0      active sync   /dev/sdb1         1       8       33        1      active sync   /dev/sdc1         2       8       49        2      active sync   /dev/sdd1         3       8       65        3      active sync   /dev/sde1

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