patseguin

OK I guess my question is answered in that it gives a performance boost and it doesn't have to be the same size as the parity drive. Could an SSD drive be effectively used as a cache drive?

I only mention WHS because it sounds like it may be a much faster solution although like you said there is no real data protection except for mirroring or if I use a RAID card. I'm hoping my preclearing is done when I get home so I can start copying data. I'm going to use teracopy as suggested.

Do you mind if I ask what advantage unRAID has over Windows Home Server 2011?

OK so it sounds like creating parity first is probably a better idea? Is teracopy something I just need to find and copy to the flash drive somewhere?

OK so is my plan of preclearing, copying data, creating parity, in that order a good plan? I was thinking doing parity last because file copy might be faster?

Ok so it seems that the drive needs to be equal to my parity drive which will be 3TB so that rules that out. I suppose I can make a share that just uses the 500GB drive?

Ever since I got my pro key I noticed a "cache drive" list along with my drives and parity drives. Am I meant to select a drive in there if I want some faster speeds? I have a 500GB hybrid HD/SSD in the machine from when I used to run Windows. Would something like that be ideal for the cache drive?

Only if you find some kind of hardware problem during your testing. You were having copy issues and crashing. If you don't figure out why then it's likely to just happen again. Peter No, I wasn't having crashing issues. It seemed to be copying really slow over the network and people here told me the speed was actually good but me being the dumbo that I am decided to cancel that and try a hard drive to raid copy. I think all of my problems were a result of rushing into it.

OK thanks. I have right around 2TB or so data so how long will that take to establish parity? I assume the web gui will show me progress?

OK thanks. As to my other question, is it a good idea to copy over my data and then create the parity drive? Or vice versa?

Fwiw, I am keeping all my media on my local PC until unRAID is good to go. bjp is totally right though. What happened was I decided I was going to try a hardware raid and I configured it in BIOS but then changed my mind after realizing all the space I could be using with unRAID. Well, when I rebooted back into unRAID my configuration was fubar. It listed drives missing, wrong, etc. Additionally, I originally skipped preclearing because I thought since they were fresh shrink wrapped drives that I would be OK. This time I am doing everything by the book. I cleared my unRAID USB stick and reinstalled it. I am now preclearing all 6 drives. Once that is done, I will create my shares and copy my media over, followed by creating the parity disk. Does this sound like a good plan of action? Also, just in case something happens - what if Windows crashes or I close the telnet window? How will I be able to tell when preclear is done? I am running all 6 preclears using Screen.

How do I just start all over again? Do I just format the USB drive and copy over my Pro Key again? The whole thing is fubar right now lol.

I am trying to delete or replace a file that got only partially copied. When I try copy copy over, it tells me it exists and when I hit yes is says"You need permission to perform this action". When I try to delete it, says "can't delete, this file is open in another window". So, how a telnet session can I find the file and forcibly delete it?

The manual says "you can run preclear_disk.sh script on a new drive before you add it to the array and unRAID will recognize that the drive already has zeros written to every sector and will only take the array offline long enough to perform a format which only takes a minute or two." These are drives right out of the packaging. Shouldn't they be good to go? The first one is at 2% after 7 minutes...

I have 3TB drives. Will that take 24 hours per drive to preclear?