O/T: RAID rant
 

I am posting from my brand new cheapo-but-still-quite-nice file server. After searching Best Buy in vain for a SATA cable, I found one at Radio Shack down the street. Ubuntu now tells me that it will take 500 minutes to do the initial sync of my RAID 1 array.

Yikes! I've tried using sysctl to raise the dev.raid.speed_limit_min to something like 300k/s, but it doesn't seem to have an effect. Guess I'll just let it go overnight...

Isn't 300 still pretty low? Mine is set to 1,000, using mdadm, and it syncs a new drive in a reasonable amount of time.

That's 300000 not 300. But changing the min doesn't seem to affect the current operation. Not sure how to do it short of rebooting. If I try to bring down the array I just get an error that the device is in use. It's fine. It'll finish in 8-9 hours.

IME you can change the max/mins on the fly for the current operation.

I was going to say "only 500 minutes?" but then I read RAID 1. Yikes! What's it doing in there, syncing across dropbox?

Dunno, but when I woke up it was still working. Looks like it's about done. 1.8 minutes left, it claims. Speed has decreased from 100,000K/s to 55,000.