> Just creating a filesystem on an 8TB disk takes hours. Are you sure you mean TB? $ for i in $(seq 8); do truncate -s 1T 8tb.$i.img; losetup --find --sho

> Just creating a filesystem on an 8TB disk takes hours. Are you sure you mean TB? $ for i in $(seq 8); do truncate -s 1T 8tb.$i.img; losetup --find --show 8tb.$i.img; done /dev/loop2 /dev/loop3 /dev/loop4 /dev/loop5 /dev/loop6 /dev/loop7 /dev/loop8 /dev/loop9 $ sudo mdadm --create --level linear -n 8 /dev/md8 /dev/loop{2..9} mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata mdadm: array /dev/md8 started. $ sudo time mke2fs /dev/md8 [lots of output snipped] real 42m0.590s user 0m2.470s sys 1m0.440s $ du -sh . # just for fun 65G . That's certainly not fast, but it's not "hours" either. It's also a magnetic disk that was actively being used by other processes. Given how much data it wrote, it averaged 25MB/s, which is not really that fast. An 8TB SSD would be much faster.