Do I need to initialize a MegaRAID virtual disk after adding it?

Question

I have an AVAGO 3108 MegaRAID controller. I added a virtual disk with the storcli64 command below. Do I also need to run storcli /c0/v0 start initialization?

storcli64 /c0 add vd type=r6 drives=0:0-10

Solution 1

It turns out that adding a virtual disk started a background initialization, which is reported differently from a typical initialization. storcli /c0/v0 show init reported nothing, but storcli /c0/c0 show bgi did indeed report that a background initialization was in progress. I didn't know about show bgi until recently.

Solution 2

Virtual drive initialization is the process to mark the vdisk/array as empty and, in the case of full initialization, to write zeroes to the entire LBA range. In other words, it erases all user data and rewrites the array metadata to disk.

So you generally want to initialize the array, unless you are trying to recover/import a foreign array.