Frank1940

What I suspects it does to over-write all of the information on the disk so that you could sell or scrap it without any worries about the security of your data that was stored on it.

Don't!!! IF you have to ask what is a very basic question, you haven't even the first idea of the problems you will be facing. unRAID was never designed to an Internet facing server. It is a NAS appliance. Your unRAID server will be completely hacked within half hour after you make it visible on the Internet. It has none of the features which are required to harden it for such use. Keep it behind a firewall. There are folks who do access it from the Internet but they are often are using a VPN service to do the task. What you could do is to reframe your question by disclosing what it is you want to do and who you want to be able do it. If there is a secure way to do that (or if that type of access would not be wise), someone (or even a number of folks) will point in the right direction.

A video that shows the difference between the 'good' molex to SATA power adapters and the 'bad' ones that have caused catastrophic overheating (OR possibly even fire like conditions) at the SATA power end of the cable. If you don't think this is a problem, do a search on YouTube

My personal opinion would be that any good modern computer PS should not be damaged by a short circuit on ANY of its output busses. They have excellent internal protection circuits to provide that type of protection. (In fact, because the insulation was virtually destroyed on those two leads was the reason that I surmised that the current was in the 30 ampere or slightly higher range. There is current protection that kicks in when the peak current exceed the rating by a very small percentage. I know that several years when I was specify PS's for use in Test Sets that I was designing, the voltage would 'fold back' to only 1-3 Volt level when the current rating was exceeded. Remember that PS will deliver about 60 Amperes on that 12 V rail. Some of the other Disks drives on that buss probably stayed on line while the whole smoking thing was going on!)

Looking the connector, I can see bare wire on two of the conductor wires and one of them appears to a 'black' wire which is ground. That would lead me to it was a short between the a supply line and one of the ground returns and from the location of the damage, it was apparently inside of the SATA power connector. If you look at the spec for this connector, it has 15 pins--- 3 pins for +12V, 3 pins for +5V, 3 pins for +3.3V, and 6 pins for ground returns. So provision must be made to attach each power wire to 3 pins on the socket . This would lead me to suspect that something was array awry in the mechanical assembly that allowed a short to occur inside of the socket itself. I would guess that the current flow was somewhere in the plus 30 ampere range to cause this much damage. As was suggested earlier, double check the hard drive end of this connection to verify that the heat did not damage the contact surfaces or warp the plastic. Clean the contact surface with Alcohol and made sure (if the drive still works) that the connection stays cool. EDIT 2: IF you have any other Molex-to-SATA power adapters from the same purchase, I would throw them away right now!!!!

I have been following the thread off-and-on for a while and When I saw this layout, I thought of some of the Media Production logos that I have been seeing in the Intro to most movies. Many of them use this type of manipulation of alphabet letters to create a unique and memorable logo. I know LimeTech is going to be using a Professional Designer to do the final product but they (evidently) felt they wanted some input from the larger community. Perhaps, just to simulate their thought processes so that they have some feel for what they do and don't like. (Plus, it is a free brainstorming session! Who knows. Someone here might have just what they are looking for. )

Might I suggest overlapping and interlocking the 'U' and the 'n' which would create a unique Trademark that should an easily defended as a Trademark as it could not be simply seen as a normal English word...

Double check that you haven't create two paths on the Linux side that are identical expect for the capitalization in the name of one of the folders somewhere in the path. (As an Example--- Filmer and filmer) While Linux is perfectly happy with this naming convention, Windows will only show you one of them as it ignores capitalization. (File names in MS-DOS were always capitalized and it carried over into Windows as it ran as an application on top of MS-DOS.)

It appears that life has interfered with @gfjardim 's ability to be to support this plugin at the present time. He does occasionally log into the forum but it has been sometime since he has posted anything. So it appears that if you want to use this plugin with the most recent versions of unRAID you are going to have to patch the plugin's .plg file before installing it or use the link for the updated file that was posted up on Reddit by a user (ohlin5 ) who folked it over on github. Of course, the $64 question is-- will he continue to maintain it. (Granted this last round of problems was caused when the version number of gcc because of changes to it but we can probably expect more of these types of problems.) So each of us are going to have to pick what he/she wants to do as there are a minimum of four ways to go that I can think of right off the top of my head. (No, I am not going to post them as there will be immediately several posts with another one or two ways in each!) Oh, one more thing. Could someone download both versions and run the Linux command that lists the differences between these two files to make sure that the change documented is the only one! (I would do it but I have forgotten the command...)

The in the second post that reads: Hot damn, great find!! For anyone who wants to try it, I forked the repo and made that simple change of the 7.3.0 addition and this URL works for install: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dohlin/unRAID-plugins/master/plugins/preclear.disk.plg I take no responsibility for errors obviously, but it seems to work on my end. Great find, OP! in this thread Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/7wjpus/preclear_working_on_641/ If you copy and paste the link into the 'Install plugin' Link box, the updated version will be install automatically. permalink embed save report reply

OK, in that case have a look at the "Unassigned" Devices plugin. It should do what you want.

If a desktop Windows computer is available, one could use a hot swap bay like this one rather than an ESATA solution: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00126U0VA/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I2HTCJRBPFQG14&colid=11QMLXLGKSS72&psc=1 While there is a cost involved, it is rather nominal.

Since no one else has jumped in, I will tell what I recall of using USB connected disks. That is that you can not get a SMART report from a disk connected via USB. (I may be wrong but everyone who has been discussing preclearing/testing disks for unRAID array usage has been using a SATA setup when it would be so much easier to use USB if it worked.)

See here: https://www.lifewire.com/free-hard-drive-testing-programs-2626183

Just for confirmation: https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/68985-unraid-os-version-641-stable-release-available/?page=5&tab=comments#comment-632515

@garycase, could describe exactly what your physical setup is to do this. Did you install a hot swap bay or what? EDIT: One more quick question, will WD Data Lifeguard work with any manufacturer's drive?

Where (or at what point) in the preclear operation is this causing a problem? What are the symptoms? I seem to recall that someone had actually used Joe L's script successfully with 6..4.1.

@luisv, the preclear function is strictly optional. It is not required for your server to run properly. If the drive requires clearing, the unRAID OS WILL clear the disk before it is put into use. Now a quick bit of history. Several generations of unRAID version ago, the array was not mounted while the preclear the operation was being performed. This probably was not to long a period when drive capacities were small but as drive captivity increased so did the time when the array was offline until the preclear was finished. It was proposed and a shell script was written to do this prior to adding the drive to array which reduced the time from a many hours to couple of minutes. Now for the tricky part. Disk drives have a failure curve that follows the 'bathtub failure' mode (Google for details) and it was decided that doing a bit of testing would probably catch many cases of infant morality on a drive before it was placed in service. (The first couple of computers that I purchased were burned in for 72 hours before the vendor would ship it to prevent returns for this class of failures. I don't think that many vendors are doing this today.) Thus, the preclear script evolved... It is really your choice. Many of us old timers would really like some assurance that the drive is not going to fail a couple of days after it goes into service. (Just read the forums and the number of questions from users when a drive does have problems and some of the situations which folks have gotten themselves into when they panic a bit!) How many defective (or soon to be defective) drives are caught by running a few preclear cycles. I would say it is probably less than 1%. BUT, If you should get one of the one-percent, would you prefer to deal with the issues before or after you put it in an array? Your choice.

If the disk is not already formatted with either XFS , reiserfs, or btrfs file systems, the default format is controlled by going to Settings >>> DiskSettings and making sure that Default partition format is set to XFS . Any new disk added to the array will now be formatted with that File system. The default at this time is XFS. You can change for an individual disk when the array is stopped by going to the Main tab clicking on a disk, and changing the Default file system from Auto to the file system that you want. (Be care as this will erase any data on this disk!)

If you don't fins it, you could e-mail LimeTech with the email address(es) and see if they have a record of the purchase and whether you activated that second license. EDIT: If you are going to do this type of hardware upgrade and I would recommend that you get a screen capture of your drive assignments. Recent version of unRAID remember drive assignments by the drive's serial number but that change was only implemented a few years back.

Good to know that it still works with version 6.4. That saves me the bother of having to run a test using a 3TB drive.

Yes, there is. It is Joe L.'s preclear script which you can find here: https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/2732-preclear_disksh-a-new-utility-to-burn-in-and-pre-clear-disks-for-quick-add/ I don't believe that it is being actively supported at this time. However, Joe L. did issue a patch which allows it to work on recent releases. You can find that here. https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/12391-re-preclear_disksh-a-new-utility-to-burn-in-and-pre-clear-disks-for-quick-add/?page=53#comment-460592 and a second one that is required for (atleast ) 6.4.1 and later unRAID versions: https://lime-technology.com/forums/topic/12391-re-preclear_disksh-a-new-utility-to-burn-in-and-pre-clear-disks-for-quick-add/?page=54&tab=comments#comment-632319 You can use the new Terminal window (use the right Mouse button in the Terminal window) in version 6.4.1 to apply the mod. I would suggest that you copy and paste that sed command. (sed is a very powerful UNIX editing tool and it does not give much feed back so be careful! Footnote: sed was written back in the day when Teletype machines were still being used as terminals so the less the output the quicker (and quieter) things were.) Using it is a bit of a pain but read (and print) the first post, you will have the basics. For a more complete set of instructions, you can go to this Wiki: https://wiki.unraid.net/Configuration_Tutorial#Preclear_Hard_Drives I would suggest that you print it out also. Having both of these in hand will make it relatively simple to use the script. Edit 1: Modified Link to Configuration Tutorial to point to Preclear Section. Edit 2: Added link to substitute strings-BDS for strings which is not in release 6.4.1. Edit 3: Fixed link to Preclear WIKI

Always a good idea!!! I have never heard of anyone needing either a screen shot or a backup of their Flash Drive when they have one in hand.

My suggestion (If you don't want to put one together yourself) is to look for a system without an OS included. The CPU type you are looking for a basic dual core CPU (If Intel, Pentium or i3) with a passmark close to 4000. (That gives you about 2000 per core. Which is about minimum of Plex transcoding of 1080 streams.) There are usually a few PC vendors who will supply these systems for the Linux geeks. You can look at my signature for an upend system that easily meets your requirements. The MB, CPU and RAM were about $250.00 early in 2017. You could save a bit by going down to a Pentium. USB drives should be from a brand name vendor), less than 32GB, USB2 and plugged into a UBS2 port on the Computer. (USB3 Drives and USB3 ports have given problems when used with certain MB. It is best to avoid USB3 usage for your unRAID boot drive. unRAID uses that USB drive so little that no one has ever detected any slowdown due to UBS2.) I personally would try to avoid the generic no-name PS. You really want one that is rated about 400W and has a single 12V rail. (unRAID will spin up all of the drives simultaneously and the single rail is more capable of meeting the peak starting current when this occurs.)

I am only replying because (given the way you asked your question) you will probably not receive a reply otherwise. As far as I know, there is no method to upload a file to your server directly from the GUI. (I, personally, can't see any reason why one would even wanting to do so. The File Managers of OS's are much better suited for doing such tasks.)