[SOLVED] Large Number of Writes on WD EADS 2TB Drive

[MurrayW]

I just put my unraid server together, copied over some data and on all of my data disks except 1 I have 50-60 writes.  My 2TB WD Eads drive has 19,456 writes.  Do I need to run WDIDLE3 on it?  Should I be worried about it?  I precleared each drive 3x before using them and all the 2TB drives were brand new, never used before.  The 1TB and 750 GB drives had been used as external drives for my DirecTV DVR's before I precleared them.

 

thanks,

Murray

[MurrayW]

One other question.  My cache drive is unformatted.  Do I need to format it in order to use it?

[Joe L.]

One other question.  My cache drive is unformatted.  Do I need to format it in order to use it?

My guess is that everything you've written to the unRAID array was stored on the disk with the "write" activity.  The 50-60 writes is quite normal for just mounting the drives.

 

Yes, you do need to format the cache drive before it will be used.  You also need to enable it on each of your user-shares you wish to utilize it.

[lionelhutz]

It's really not a large number of writes.

 

Any issue requiring wdiddle3 won't show up on the writes counter. Only SMART reports can tell you it's required.

 

Peter

 

[MurrayW]

One other question.  My cache drive is unformatted.  Do I need to format it in order to use it?

My guess is that everything you've written to the unRAID array was stored on the disk with the "write" activity.  The 50-60 writes is quite normal for just mounting the drives.

 

Yes, you do need to format the cache drive before it will be used.  You also need to enable it on each of your user-shares you wish to utilize it.

I have set up several user shares, most of them using split level 1 and all using high-water.  Data was only written to 2 disks (disk 4 and disk 5).  Disk 4 with low writes has ~700GB used and disk 5 with the larger number of writes has around 350GB used.  If I shouldn't worry about the difference, then I won't.  I was wondering why only disk 4 and 5 were used when I moved files onto the array.  One of my shares is Movies using split level 1 across all disks.  I have around 40 folders that contain the individual movies.  My understanding was that using a split level 1 and high-water, movie 1 would go to disk 1, move 2 to disk 2, ... movie 9 to disk 1, etc. instead of all the movies going to disk 4 and 5.

 

I'll format my cache drive.  I had enabled it but forgot to format it.

 

thanks,

Murray

[Joe L.]

that is not how high-water works.

 

See here in the un-official manual in the wiki for an explanation.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Allocation_method

[MurrayW]

that is not how high-water works.

 

See here in the un-official manual in the wiki for an explanation.

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Allocation_method

I had read that when I set up my shares, but I guess I still don't understand it.  I understand why my 750GB or the two 1TB drives were not used, but why did it write movies only on disk 4 and disk 5 and leave my other three 2TB drives alone?  It seems to me that it would either write all the movies to one drive (< 1TB total needed) or spread them out among the five 2TB drives.

 

Sorry for asking so many questions, but something isn't clicking for me.

 

thanks,

Murray

[lionelhutz]

I hate to break it to you but you've got over 1T of data stored on that array. Take another look at the free space.

 

Your largest drive is 2T meaning the high water level is set to 1T. Disk4 was the first drive with > 1T of free space so it was used for file storage. When disk4's free space got below 1T then the next drive with > 1T of free space wass used, or disk5 in your case. It working exactly how it is supposed to. Disk4 has just under 1T of free space and unRAID moved on to using disk5. When disk5 has < 1T of free space then disk6 will be used. And so on.

 

Peter.

[MurrayW]

I hate to break it to you but you've got over 1T of data stored on that array. Take another look at the free space.

 

Your largest drive is 2T meaning the high water level is set to 1T. Disk4 was the first drive with > 1T of free space so it was used for file storage. When disk4's free space got below 1T then the next drive with > 1T of free space wass used, or disk5 in your case. It working exactly how it is supposed to. Disk4 has just under 1T of free space and unRAID moved on to using disk5. When disk5 has < 1T of free space then disk6 will be used. And so on.

 

Peter.

OK, I now understand!  Thanks for the clarification.

Murray