thisisepic0727

It doesn't take much to convince me, I'm good with doing 2 preclears and I'll see how long the first on takes and I'll figure out if I have time for a 3rd preclear. I was really hoping to have the drives ready to be put into the array on Saturday, when I'll have time to work on this. But I'd rather be safe than sorry. Subsequent cycles are an attempt to get past the early part of the "bathtub curve" where disks fail in their first few days of service. Before they hold your data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve Joe L., I had never heard of the bathtub curve before. I guess it's true, you learn something new everyday. As mentioned above, I'll do at least 2 preclears and hopefully I'll have time to fit in a 3rd. Thanks everyone for the input - I think I might actually understand what I'm doing now.

What's the benefit of doing more than one preclear? For instance, if I preclear a drive once and the results are perfect (hypothetically speaking), what would preclearing a second time prove? I suppose it gives you a peace of mind that the first results are verified, but does it do anything else? I can totally understand preclearing a drive multiple times if there are errors or changes in values. In my case, I'm going to wait till I get the results (tonight) before I decide to start another preclear cycle. I'm not against preclearing a 2nd time as prostuff1 suggested, but I'm also impatient, so doing preclearing more than that might be difficult for me. Any other thoughts on this? Thanks again!

I'm new to unRAID and preclear. I just started 1 cycle of preclearing last night on 3 WD20EARS drives. I'm using unRAID 4.7 and preclear 1.9. What is the suggested number of cycles I should preclear a drive? I've seen multiple answers ranging from 2-3 (and more) preclears before using the drive in an array. Somewhere I think I saw that after 1 successful preclear pass, I should follow-up with 2 continuous cycles of preclear. I'm not quite sure how many cycles I should run. Maybe the answer is more simple in that I only need to run 1 cycle of preclear (I doubt this, but I would appreciate the community's feedback). I really have no idea, can someone help me out? Thanks!