musclecups

I suggested the parity swap because he mentioned the 12/12 case capacity limit. Take out a 3, parity swap the 14 for the 6, which adds the 6 to the array. Not sure why that isn't the correct advice.

https://wiki.unraid.net/The_parity_swap_procedure This is what you want.

First step is preclear the 14 (should take about 100ish hours). Parity shuffle it 14-->6-->3(remove). Then move another 3 onto your 6. Boom, 2 slots open to preclear at your leisure.

I think you may be incorrect. As ChatNoir pointed out, binhex may not "make" a preclear, but he certainly does maintain a docker image of a preclear someone made and to which he contributed. In my case, used drives make a tonne of sense. My data is 99% media files (quite a few of them). All of which are easily replaceable. So if two drives happen to fail at once, some data loss would not be the end of the world. I have a pretty tight budget when it comes to my NAS, which includes the power to run it. So, the ideal would be SSD's, but those are too spendy. So, it's high-density HDD's. 14tb is the sweet spot atm in terms of $/tb, and the SAS drives I am using are 425USD on amazon as of writing. I bought them from a reputable seller for 125USD -- they report 3 on/off cycles, only handfull of writes, and 4 years of spintime. They're made for datacenters and weren't abused. With a supposed MBTF of 2.5 million hours, I think they'll probably perform pretty well for me.

I assume the new ones are bigger? Once you have n+1 old drives worth of new drives, then you have some wiggle room. Also, I'm all for having the drive outside the enclosure for a few days while you preclear it. Just put something heavy on it if you're worried about vibration, and point a fan at it if you're concerned about heat. Or use a separate machine to preclear. The binhex container's FAQ mentions that preclearing two at once shouldn't be an issue.

I recently bought 5 drives (14TB Seagate Exos x14) used from Ebay to add to my array. I started binhex/preclear on one, and it's gonna take like 90hours. There are 3 years reported on the drives. Can I assume it's past the first part of the bathtub curve? Is it worth the time to preclear? I still have about 60 days on the DoA warranty from the seller. Any advice, no matter how anecdotal, would be appreciated.