ChuckS

This helped. Thanks everyone for the quick answers. I appreciate the high level of user support as I jump into unRAID. I will be heading over to the Pre-clear threads and test results threads next. Much appreciated.

Thanks for the responses. I am having some other NIC related (I hope) issues so I will probably redo the build and pre-clear the drives. So far only a test system so nothing really lost yet. Would rather do it right. On the fact that 1 in 5 drives fails pre-clear what do others do about this? Seems like a very high faliure rate. Do you return the drives to the manufacturer? Seems like a 20% cost increase on drives if you just eat that percentage of bad drives. Any issue with manufacturers taking them back? Regards, Chuck

I am new to unRaid and trying to understand some of the basic concepts. I have built a system following the guides here on the forms and WiKi. I was a bit confused on the pre-clear script. It seemed in the user guide that it mentioned it was not necessary to run a pre-clear when setting up a system for the first time. It also mentioned to copy all your data then enable the parity drive as this would save some time. I started my initial install without pre-clearing the drives and with parity off (I reserved a drive but am not using it yet.) So my question is around parity and pre-clear. It seems one reason to run the pre-clear script when adding a new drive to an already parity protected system is that the parity would not be effected by a drive with all zeros. So if this is true and parity is not used then there should be no reason to run pre-clear (other than testing the drive for potential issues). If parity is turned on then why couldn’t a new drive (without being cleared to all zeros) be added if you run a new parity check right after adding? Seems like this might be faster then pre-clearing? Not sure what I am missing or if my initial install was not done correctly (although it seems to be working for the most part.) Thanks, Chuck