Question on Hot Swaps/HDD Enclosures and Preclearing

[Hawkins12]

My unraid server drive bays are 100% full.  Because of my desire to have backup HDD's ready to go, I decided to buy a Sabrent HDD Enclosure that plugs in via USB to the unraid server.  The purpose of this is to buy additional drives, preclear those drives, and have them ready to go in case of failure so downtime/time necessary to rewrite a failed hdd would be as limited as possible. 

 

That being said, when I tried my first HDD preclear, I see the following in Unraid Note that I am actually preclearing a WD 2TB HDD that was actually deployed in the server previously and replaced.  When the drive was deployed it looked something like : (yes I know this is a 6TB but only provided for purposes of illustration. 

 

Now this reminds me when I would buy the WD HDD's shuckable drives.  I would leave them in the enclosures while I ran the preclear 2-3 times so it would be easier to return (or to prevent any hassle from trying to return a shucked drive).  It's been a while since I've done this and the new unraid is here with more Preclear settings than previously. 

 

My question is that once this drive is erased/precleared, will it be hot swappable (if I don't use the Sabrent Enclosure)?  Will Unraid recognize that the drive is prepped even if it isn't in the Sabrent enclosure?  Am I overthinking this altogether?  I was planning to buy some 14TB drives so the future disk replacements could take quite a while which is why I was testing on my 2TB spare drive for now. 

 

Thanks!

[itimpi]

It all depends on whether is playing around with the way it displays the geometry of the drive would be compatible with the way it is displayed when plugged in via SATA.    Unless someone can but in with experience of that particular enclosure it is going to be a case of trying a drive to see.

[Hawkins12]

5 minutes ago, itimpi said:

It all depends on whether is playing around with the way it displays the geometry of the drive would be compatible with the way it is displayed when plugged in via SATA.    Unless someone can but in with experience of that particular enclosure it is going to be a case of trying a drive to see.

Thanks for the quick reply.  I suspected this was the case.  Hopefully someone has experience with this.  I did notice this when I looked at the drive attributes:

 

 

Nothing carried over and is displaying via USB.  I think that's pointing towards this strategy not working.  I just wanted to buy some Manuf. Recert drives and have them tested first while under warranty but I might have to go another route.

 

That being said, are you aware of any USB solutions that may work for my use case?  Note that I don't want to run a drive off USB within the array -- simply preclear/test prior to deploying into the server at some future date. 

Edited August 19, 2023 by Hawkins12