Preclearing drives while using the server, a question

[ibixat]

As is expected, once I set up unraid to store my media collection my collection rapidly expanded to fill all available space.  Now I'm ready to slap a few more drives into my main system but I'm curious about the preclears.  When I setup this system I was only able to do a few drives at a time as they were in use or being transferred over etc, so in the end I had precleared 3 drives transferred information over and then precleared the next 3.  I never really was using the system too hard while the second batch of preclears ran.  I have 5 more drives coming in this week (for those of you wincing at 5 drives in one order I 2 WD 2 Samsung and 1 hitachi to reduce the chance of a bad batch of one type wreaking havoc) but I was curious what opinions there were regarding preclearing multiple drives while using for normal media serving duty.  Would you just take a system with 7 drives currently (1 parity 5 data 1 cache) and preclear the 5 drives all at once in that machine, would you limit the number to preclear at once to 2 or 3, or would you consider hooking them up in another machine and clearing them there?  Just looking for some suggestions from those who have more experience with this than I do so any tips or suggestions would be welcome.

 

Thanks

Brian

[technojunkie]

It really depends on the horsepower of your system. I run a supermicro x7sla-h with 2 GB of RAM and can easily preclear 3 drives simultaneously. I've not noticed an impact to being able to access my media while preclearing.