Hello,

     I built a new server on Thursday. I put in 6 shucked 14 Tb easystore drives, installed the preclear software, and began the preclear with pre- and post-read. That is now wrapping up and I wanted to get a sanity check on what I'm doing next and input on how long creating the array will take.

     I plan to use two drives as parity and the rest for data. How long will it take to create this array? SpaceInvader One indicated that building parity will take a while. I'm just going to be dumping terabytes of data on it for the foreseeable future, should I just create the data array and add the parity drives when I'm done with the initial dump? I'd rather have protection from the beginning but it would be very inconvenient tonight to have to wait another dozen hours before I could start adding files

2 hours ago, Crunchable said:

I plan to use two drives as parity and the rest for data. How long will it take to create this array?

IF you don't have any parity, a few minutes while the data drives are formatted. 

 

2 hours ago, Crunchable said:

SpaceInvader One indicated that building parity will take a while. I'm just going to be dumping terabytes of data on it for the foreseeable future, should I just create the data array and add the parity drives when I'm done with the initial dump?

This how I would recommend doing it.  Building the initial parity will be at least 24 hours.  Plus, the write speed of the data will be about half the speed with the parity as compared to without it.  As long as you keep the source data intact until you are certain that you don't have any issues-- consider infant problem of new hardware ---, you should be safe from any loss of data due to any failure  in the new server. 

 

Remember that an Unraid server is not a backup.  Be sure that you have another backup of any data that irreplaceable!!!