Re: preclear_disk.sh - a new utility to burn-in and pre-clear disks for quick add


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ok..  I see there is a bunch of info in the /tmp directory..  so you do it..

 

Can you add the diff to the e-mail report between cycles?

Also can you add the pending report also the e-mail reports?

 

I can probably add them..  but would probably be faster for you to add it to the next release..

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

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I do have another question...  I noticed that on my second pass It went right to zeroing?  There is no pre-read?

 

I did a search on this thread for "skip pre" and I only got info about the added command line options.

 

Is new and expected?

 

Jim

 

EDIT:  Never mind...  I saw it on the .9.9 or so version notes..  SO I guess that it's not needed since you just did a post read on the previous cycle?

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joe have a disc was preclearing when a storm hit - comp running telnet restarted - unraid server not affected still running script - am monitoring via a laptop - my main showing that it is in the last post read of 3 cycles. can I reconnect the telnet session - not showing any issues to this point . is the last set of preclear data kept somewhere - as the sever seems to have finally recogised that telnet has died.

if running under screen, you cwn reattach. It not,it is in /tmp if you have not rebooted.

 

is temp folder available to explorer in windows ? I can see it via telnet

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  • 2 months later...

I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

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I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

That would entirely depend on your hardware.
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I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

That would entirely depend on your hardware.

 

I figured a Dual core AMD with 4GB memory would fair pretty well

 

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I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

That would entirely depend on your hardware.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU or the RAM.  It has entirely to do with the bus bandwidth to the disks and the I/O contention on the disk controllers involved.

 

Joe L.

 

I figured a Dual core AMD with 4GB memory would fair pretty well

 

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I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

That would entirely depend on your hardware.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU or the RAM.   It has entirely to do with the bus bandwidth to the disks and the I/O contention on the disk controllers involved.

 

Joe L.

 

I figured a Dual core AMD with 4GB memory would fair pretty well

 

 

Well it is preclearing at just over 100MB/s which I think is a good number from what I have seen here. I Guess it is just sucking the bandwidth dry from the other disks. I *thought* that since the other drives were on the MB controller there would be less of an impact, but I guess it does not work that way.

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I am running preclear for the first time now and was wondering if it is normal for running a preclear to slow down writting to the array to a crawl? I understand it is working the drive but  I am now copying data to the cache drive at 2.38MB/s instead of in the Mid 40's The disk I am preclearing is on a PCIE controller, it is a cheapo 2 port masscool. Everything else is on the mb sata connectors.

 

Thanks for any info.

 

John

That would entirely depend on your hardware.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU or the RAM.   It has entirely to do with the bus bandwidth to the disks and the I/O contention on the disk controllers involved.

 

Joe L.

 

I figured a Dual core AMD with 4GB memory would fair pretty well

 

 

Joe L.

 

Do you think this could be caused by the cheap masscool controller in the system? The MB has 6 sata 3gb connectors which are full. The only drive on the masscool is the one being precleared. The first cycle has just about completed step 10 and it has just about been 20 hrs so performance seems to be good that way.

 

I am just looking for any tips that may keep the array a bit more usable while I am preclearing drives. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

John

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  • 3 months later...

Hey guys, I'm trying to download the preclear_disk.sh file from the firs thread and when I click the download link it just downloads me an index.php file, it's like the link is broken or something.

 

I'm very new to unRAID so excuse me if I'm doing something wrong :/

The link in http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817.msg23246#msg23246 this post works fine for me. Which post are you referring to?

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Hey guys, I'm trying to download the preclear_disk.sh file from the firs thread and when I click the download link it just downloads me an index.php file, it's like the link is broken or something.

 

I'm very new to unRAID so excuse me if I'm doing something wrong :/

The link in http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817.msg23246#msg23246 this post works fine for me. Which post are you referring to?

 

HNG, I get up this morning and the link works fine first try  :-\

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Hi there,

 

I managed to get preclear installed on my HP Microserver with help from the Wiki  :).  I've run successful preclears on 4 out of 5 Hitachi 5K3000 2TBs however the 5th has thrown up 49 re-allocated sectors on each of 2 passes so far.  I've tested the drive using Hitachi's DFT tools but it found no errors over 4 passes. Have also tested the drive in question under Windows with Chkdsk from a command line as well as the Windows version (Properties > Tools), again no errors.

 

The drive in question was basically new having only been used in OS testing before settling on UNRAID.  Any ideas what might cause Preclear to find errors when other tools don't?  I don't want to return a good drive if I can avoid it, these drives are out of stock everywhere here and seems a refund would be my only option.

 

Note: I'm running 4.7 Plus.

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Hi there,

 

I managed to get preclear installed on my HP Microserver with help from the Wiki  :).  I've run successful preclears on 4 out of 5 Hitachi 5K3000 2TBs however the 5th has thrown up 49 re-allocated sectors on each of 2 passes so far.  I've tested the drive using Hitachi's DFT tools but it found no errors over 4 passes. Have also tested the drive in question under Windows with Chkdsk from a command line as well as the Windows version (Properties > Tools), again no errors.

 

The drive in question was basically new having only been used in OS testing before settling on UNRAID.  Any ideas what might cause Preclear to find errors when other tools don't?  I don't want to return a good drive if I can avoid it, these drives are out of stock everywhere here and seems a refund would be my only option.

 

Note: I'm running 4.7 Plus.

Please post a "smart" report. 

(you can find them as created by the pre-clear process under the "preclear_reports" directory on the flash drive)

Zip them and attach to your next post.

 

Until I see the final status report, no way to know what happened.  I have no idea of what tests the other tools perform, but unless they each took at least 8 hours, they did not do as comprehensive a test reading and writing and re-reading each sector. 

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Thanks Joe, I'm just waiting for the most recent preclear run on the drive to finish.  I've attached the reports from the original run.

 

Hitachi's DFT test ran for some time but to be honest I didn't note the elapsed time, probably not the 27-29 hours each preclear took.  Same for chkdsk from the command prompt.

 

Update:  Latest preclear completed with same result, let me know if you want those logs as well.

preclear_finish__ML0220F30GNJ3D_2012-02-25.zip

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The preclear reports showed no re-allocated sector prior to it being run, it showed

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0033  100  100  005    Pre-fail  Always      -      49

49 sectors being re-allocated after its completion.

 

That count will NEVER go down.  It is not zeroed for the next test.  (It might increment upward over time as additional sectors are found un-readable, but... if the number is stable, there is not an issue.  )

There are no sectors pending re-allocation.  (that is good)

 

Most modern drives have several thousand spare sectors in its pool to be used for re-allocation.  Your drive has used 49 from that reserve.

The normalized value of 100 compared to the failure threshold of 5 is what the manufacturer uses to determine if the drive is FAILING_NOW, or not.

 

I'd say use the drive.  No need to RMA it.    If you see additional un-readable sectors showing up (they'll show as "read" errors on the unRAID management console) then consider replacing the drive.    I've got one old drive in my array that has had the exact same 100 re-allocated sectors since the first time I cleared it.  it has not changed and is as reliable as any other in my server.

 

Joe L.

 

 

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Joe,

 

Is there a way to only pre-read a disk?

 

I have a bad disk and I want to see if it will even get past the preread.  But I don't want to

write any data to it (yet) in case I need to yank some data off.

SeaTools puked on it.  I want to see if it's even worth trying to salvage!

 

SMART reports a ton of hardware_ECC_Recovered in the raw column.  It had way more on a previous power cycle..  Not sure if the raw value means anything for that or not.

 

Also... Just as a nit for the next update, the help function mentions the -V option in an example but it doesn't explain it when it spells out the other - options.

 

Also again..  maybe if you could list the help contents to the third forum post.  A lot of times I use "screen" for pre-clear and when I do help it just scrolls off the top.  I don't know if "screen": will capture stderr (is that where it goes?).  I know I have a hard time using screen and pre-clear -h.  Maybe I just need to learn how to "Scroll" in screen.

 

But if it were on the forum post, then I'd always know where to reference it!

 

:D

 

Jim

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  • 2 weeks later...

hi guys!

First, thank you for this forum and all the informations and help that we can find.

 

I am building my first unraid server and I am doing fine, so far.

My next step is to preclear my disks, but when I try to download the preclear_disk.zip on the first post of this page http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817.msg23246#msg23246, it sends me  a 404 message error.

 

Has someone the same issue? Or maybe I am looking at the wrong place.

 

Thank you for your help.

 

Marco

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  • 4 months later...

What is the best way to copy the preclear reports from the USB drive to a Windows machine?  I am in the process of setting up my first unRAID server and have successfully precleared one small drive.  The 2 TB drive I was trying to preclear made it through the ten steps successfully, but must have failed the post read-in.

 

Thanks.

 

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What is the best way to copy the preclear reports from the USB drive to a Windows machine?  I am in the process of setting up my first unRAID server and have successfully precleared one small drive.  The 2 TB drive I was trying to preclear made it through the ten steps successfully, but must have failed the post read-in.

 

Thanks.

On the windows machine, open file-explorer and navigate to

\\tower\flash\preclear_reports

 

Then just copy the reports desired.

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Simple enough.  Thanks.

 

The next issue is that a new WD WD20EARX 2TB hard drive is not completing the preclear script.  It has Advanced Format capability and I have tried preclear using both the -A option and without (Disk Settings, Default partition format: MBR: 4K aligned has been applied through the interface).  In one of the WD brochures I found for the hard drive, it indicated a jumper could be used to enable/force the AF capability.  I am not using a jumper on the hard drive.  No reports are generated so I can't post anything.  The preclear script makes it past the ten Steps, but then indicates the disk could not be precleared.  Time elapsed was a bit under 7 hours, which from what I have read doesn't seem very long.

 

Any suggestions on how to proceed from here?  I was able to successfully clear an older HD.

 

Thanks.

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