Hello,

 

When I first put my server together a month or so ago, I used two WD20EARS drives that I already had, and I bought two new ones. The old drives were jumpered as I had been using them in a Windows XP box, and I left them that way when I moved them to my unRAID box. However, the new ones that I bought were unjumpered, and after some reading, I'm wondering if anything could go wrong because of it. One is the parity disk, and the other is a data disk.

 

I am running 4.7-beta. I hadn't learned about the preclear script at that point, and I just used whatever the regular formatter is that the webUI has. Is this going to cause any problems? I have read that these drives may or may not need some additional parameter for the preclear script, but I'm not really sure if I messed up and I'm wondering if my data is safe.

 

Scott

Normally, EARS won't cause a problem in any case. To optimize performance, the EARS without jumpers should formatted as 4K-aligned and the EARS with jumpers should not be 4K-aligned. There is no benefit to removing jumpers and reformatting. All new drives including EARS without jumpers should be 4K-aligned in version 4.7+.

So just to clarify, would the 4.7 formatter have set the alignment on my non-jumpered drives to 4K, or is this something I would've had to do with the preclear script? Also, for future reference, will the default settings of the preclear script select the proper alignment for my non-jumpered WD20EARS drives, or do I have to add an argument to the command?

The newest version of preclear_disk.sh will read the setting you have selected from the unRAID management console. If you did not select MBR 4K-Aligned then it would not have defaulted to that if you did not specify what alignment to use as an option to preclear_disk.sh. There is no way to detect if the drive is jumpered or not from the system, so it is up to the user to select the right settings.

 

By the same notion, unRAID's management console will use the setting you specified as well, so it is up to the user to select the right settings.

 

So you're running a beta of 4.7? Have you tried the final of 4.7?

Use the latest version of preclear and add -A for 4K-aligned.

Thank you for the responses. So if I'm not mistaken, the only issue with not having my non-jumpered drives 4K-aligned is performance? If that's the case, then I can rest easy for a little while. Fortunately, I guess this gives me an excuse to buy a new disk so that I can free up space on these improperly aligned drives so that I can correct the issue.

the only issue with not having my non-jumpered drives 4K-aligned is performance?

 

Yup.  That's the only issue.... and even then, it is negligible for large (i.e. media) files.