On 29th October 2011, I built a RAID-5 array using 4 x 146.8GB Seagate SAS ST3146855SS drives running at 15k connected to a PowerEdge R515 with HP Smart Array P411 controller running Windows 2008 (so nothing particularly unusual).

I know that parity initialisation of a RAID-5 array can take some time but it's still running after 2.5 weeks which seems a little unusual.

I'd previously built another array on the same controller using 4 x 2TB SATA-2 drives and that did take a while to complete but a) I'm sure it was less than 2.5 weeks, b) that array was ~12 times bigger and c) during initialization, the percentrage slowly increased each day.

At the moment, the status display for this new 2nd array simply says "Parity Initialization Status: In Progress" and it's said that since the start. It's this lack of change on the status that worries me the most - feels like it's not actually doing anything.

Do you think something has gone wrong or am I being unpatient and for some reason, the status not increasing is normal? I kind of expected a much smaller array on faster drives (15k SAS versus 7.5k SATA-2) to build in a few days.

This is our primary SAN running StarWind so my "have a play" options are very limited. This 2nd array is currently in use for one small virtual disk so I could shut the target machine down, move the virtual disk to another drive and try rebuilding.