May 2, 201115 yr Alright so I'm doing a server rebuild today and I'm having trouble figuring out how to setup my mixture of WD Green 1.5TB drives. I have 4x drives in total. When it comes to jumpering the 7 - 8 pins I have looked over the wiki page and other posts and I'm just not sure what I should do to make everything work correctly , and to also make drive upgrades in the future go smoothing because everything from now on is going to be adv format and both my parity and data1 drives are the older style of drives. 2x WD Green EADS 1.5TB - NON Advanced Format Drive 2x WD Green EARS 1.5TB - Advanced Format Drive Current Setup in Server. Parity: WDEADS DATA1: WDEADS DATA2: WDEARS - Jumpered DATA3: WDEARS - ***new just received today*** WD didn't include a jumper There is no data currently on the server. Any suggestions?
May 2, 201115 yr Format all of these drives as 4K-aligned. Make sure that 4K-aligned is set as the default in unRAID. Do NOT use any jumpers. Format all new drives as 4K-aligned regardless of AF or not. Never use a jumper. EDIT: just noticed that you have one exception. The WDEARS drive with a jumper should be formatted as 4k-UNaligned. Non AF drives can be formatted either way with no penalty. Leave existing drives formatted as is. AF drives should be 4K-aligned to maximize performance (except jumpered EARS). From now on: never add a jumper and format all drives as 4K aligned.
May 3, 201115 yr There is no data currently on the server. Any suggestions? I think that you are getting yourself worked up for no reason! The only time you need to take account of Advanced/non-Advanced drives and aligned/non-aligned partitions is when you format them. Once the formatting is done correctly, you can use that drive in any way you want (with the proviso that unRAID earlier then 4.7 didn't understand the aligned format. Use all the old drives as you have them at the moment, but set unRAID for '4k aligned' and all new drives will be formatted as aligned (which will work for advanced or non-advanced drives). Edit to add: Ah, I've just seen in your signature, that you're running unRAID 4.5.3. Either you should update that (to 4.7, or 5.0b6), or carry on using jumpers on your WD EARS drives. I think that, in your situation, I would upgrade to 4.7. You could, cautiously, try 5.0b6 but you may run into problems depending on the history of your existing drives.
May 3, 201115 yr Author Well I didn't get a response after a few hours so I went ahead and built the server. The drives are: Parity: WDEADS DATA1: WDEADS DATA2: WDEARS - Jumpered DATA3: WDEARS - Jumpered MBR Unaligned. What can I do from here, or should I just leave it?
May 3, 201115 yr Leave it now. Don't remove the jumpers and leave those EARS unaligned or with the partition starting on sector 63. Peter
May 3, 201115 yr Assuming you already assigned the drives Leave it alone. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9936.msg94803#msg94803 If the drive had not been assigned you could have had followed this on the new drive (remove jumper and MBR Aligned setting): http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4068.msg118540#msg118540 In the future - any new disk(AF or non-AF) should use MBR Aligned or the preclear "-A". There is no performance loss from starting partition 1 at sector 64.
May 3, 201115 yr Author In the future - any new disk(AF or non-AF) should use MBR Aligned or the preclear "-A". There is no performance loss from starting partition 1 at sector 64. O.k so in the future if I need to replace or add an additional drive I would not use the jumper and set the default partition format to 4K-aligned?
May 3, 201115 yr Format all of these drives as 4K-aligned. Make sure that 4K-aligned is set as the default in unRAID. Do NOT use any jumpers. Format all new drives as 4K-aligned regardless of AF or not. Never use a jumper. EDIT: just noticed that you have one exception. The WDEARS drive with a jumper should be formatted as 4k-UNaligned. Non AF drives can be formatted either way with no penalty. Leave existing drives formatted as is. AF drives should be 4K-aligned to maximize performance (except jumpered EARS). From now on: never add a jumper and format all drives as 4K aligned. I'm adding a new "batch" of drives to my system... and noticed that 4.7 defaults to MBR unaligned. Following the advise here, I'm changing that to MBR-4k aligned. I've already run 1 cycle of Preclear on this new set of drives... (mix of 1tb, 1.5tb and 2tb drives) -- so I think I can just run preclear again -- perhaps with a -C 64 to convert them? Now, my question is -- how do I determine (for my sanity) which of my drive models are "advanced format" and which ones are not -- I realize, now, that I can and should format all of my 'new' drives 4k aligned regardless. But I also have legacy drives that I'd like to "check" and re-do those {I have seen the process, so I'm OK with the process} but would like to do it only on drives that would benefit by re-doing them for alignment. What am I missing? Is there a command to 'check' to see if a drive is "advanced format"? Or a table / list of model numbers?
May 3, 201115 yr It should be written on the drive label. Or google the model number. But why does it matter? Use the -C 64 option to convert all drives except EARS with jumpers. Pre-clear -C 64 takes only seconds to complete; it assumes that the drive has already completed a preclear. Leave the jumpered EARS as UNaligned or starting at 63.
May 3, 201115 yr It should be written on the drive label. Or google the model number. But why does it matter? Use the -C 64 option to convert all drives except EARS with jumpers. Pre-clear -C 64 takes only seconds to complete; it assumes that the drive has already completed a preclear. Leave the jumpered EARS as UNaligned or starting at 63. Ok, I "care" that I may have done it wrong before. So I think the advice is: 1) Change the default to 4k-aligned in 4.7 2) From now-on, format preclear any new drive as 4k-aligned 3) Pull my old drives, look for "Advanced Format" on the label, and/or google the model numbers 4) Since all of my old-drives were formatted as "unaligned" and I never added any jumpers, then those are the ones I should "convert" New #4) Since all of my old-drives were formatted as "unaligned" and I never added any jumpers, those that say "Advanced Format" on them, or show up as AF when I google the model numbers" - then those are the ones I should "convert"
May 3, 201115 yr Yes. Although, once you determine which drives are not AF you can leave those as is.
May 3, 201115 yr Yes. Although, once you determine which drives are not AF you can leave those as is. That makes sense. Identify only the AF drives that may need reformatting. The others, don't bother.
May 3, 201115 yr =Ok, I "care" that I may have done it wrong before. So I think the advice is: 1) Change the default to 4k-aligned in 4.7 Correct. 2) From now-on, format pre-clear any new drive as 4k-aligned Setting the default will take care of that for you once set to 4K-Aligned. Pre-clear will not require the "-A" suffix. 3) Pull my old drives, look for "Advanced Format" on the label, and/or google the model numbers Can also go to the manufacturer's website for AF. Agreed it would be nice if unRAID had a list like this: http://www.synology.com/support/hd.php?lang=us&bays_id=2&product_id=45 4) Since all of my old-drives were formatted as "unaligned" and I never added any jumpers, then those are the ones I should "convert" Only if they are AF.
May 3, 201115 yr And if you have an assigned AF drive (with no jumper) and formatted with MBR-Unaligned, or pre-4.6.1 (I believe it was 4.6.1) Here is the procedure to follow - http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_Format_Drives#What_should_I_do_if_I_already_have_an_Advanced_Format_drive_in_my_array_that_isn.27t_in_compatibility_mode_.28i.e._no_jumper.29.3F
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