I just formatted 14 new 1.5TB drives (all same brand, speed, etc), 8 of them formatted (time mkfs -text3 /dev/sd*1) in about 8 minutes, 1 took a little over 11 minutes, 1 over 18 minutes, 2 over 21 minutes and another one over 30 minutes!!

Could it be the one the took over 30 minutes is a bad drive? (these are brand new drives)

How about the one that took over 18 min and the 2 that were over 21 min, is that something to be concerned about?

PS. this is on a new server too, and there is nothing else running on it, its not even connected to the internet.

TIA

I think they are not the same inside.

What do you mean? I bought them all at the same time. Same brand, size, speed, access time, cache, etc.

Can you use smart to gather information from them?

is not saying too much

Is 20-30 min to write the file system is not unheard for for drives of that size?

Well, I ran some speed tests on 2 of the drives that took a while to format, using hdparm and writing a 10GB file using dd and then reading it.

It took about 1.5 minutes to write the file on drives that formatted quickly.

And on 2 drives that formatted slow, took 2.5 min and 4 min.

The time to read the 10GB file was comprable to the time it took to write it.

So it looks like with the one drive, writes and reads are taking over twice as long as the others.

This would indicate there is likely a problem, correct?

Since you bought 14 of them, it should not be hard to return one or two for replacement. I don't think they will complain too much.

I like to use mhdd for this kind of thing, to check sector read times. Is a very good tool to determine whats going on.