Been reading ablut cache drive but.i.have not yet read if they have to be.precleared or not. Can someone clear this concern of mine?

All drives *should* be pre-cleared before deploying into a production environment, but none *must* be.

 

One could argue it's even more important for a cache drive as it isn't part of the protected array. So in a drive failure, you lose all the data on the cache drive.

 

You'll find very few people on this forum who don't pre-clear every drive that goes into their systems.

Many use pre-clear on all disks regardless of use. I.e., disks that are used in a windows or mac are pre-cleared.