Is initialization of a new RAID 5 volume necessary ?

[healthyboy]

Good day,

 

consider a RAID 5 array consisting of 3x4TB HDDs on an intel RST onboard controller

 

My understand is that initialization builds parity information for each data block on the volume, but since this is a freshly created volume, I don't really care about the current parity information status.

 

I also understand that when I begin writing data to the volume, proper parity information will be created for the new data and written to the volume.

 

so why do I need to initialize a blank RAID 5 volume ?

 

also if a drive fails on an uninitialized volume, will I still be able to rebuild it ?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Jarsky]

Yes you need to initialize a new array. It's not building parity, its learning the block state of the array for parity. 

Background initialization is checking parity state to ensure everything is consistant - normally after a change to the array or some sort of failure. 

 

You can use the raid while the initialization runs, it's just generally slower performance until its finished. 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id stay away from the intel rst raid as the onboard motherboard raid is known to be bad. Your much better off using the software raid in your os.