keyman33 Posted December 12, 2011 Posted December 12, 2011 Hi there – a few questions on AF and Preclear! (and a small one about unmenu) I recently posted that I have errors on my Disk2 (EARS) and the feedback was to replace the drive asap. So I’ve purchased the drive (EARX) and coincidentally I am building an Unraid server for my Dad and need to preclear his drives, so thought I’d do his and my new one all at the same time, on his server. (His is still empty, no formatted drives…early in the process) So last night, I read up on the preclear and screen used this command for each of the drives, overnight: ./preclear_disk.sh –m myemailaddress -c 3 /dev/sdX This will in theory, send an email to me upon completion and do the exercise 3 times. I checked myMain performance view in Unmenu (awesome tool by the way) and could see everything was working well. Off to bed. However, it suddenly struck me in the night that I had failed to set the “–A” parameter to use the AF format. This morning I checked my “Settings” page and unfortunately, the disk was set to “unaligned”, so I needed that parameter as it will set to unaligned by default. Question 1: Should I stop the current preclear process (if so, how?) or is there something that can be done to salvage the preclear work afterwards? If not, would be logical to think that if I let it finish, then change the settings to “aligned-4k”, then have unraid do it’s normal thing when putting in a new drive (which I understand is a built-in 1 time preclear), I’d be ok? My thinking is as the drive has already been through it’s paces (though on the wrong setting) so it should be solid. This prompted me to check my own unraid EARS settings and I see I was smart enough to put the jumpers on 7,8 when I built my server. However, I was stupid and I have my disk settings on “unaligned”. Question 2: I’m taking a performance hit, I understand, but do I really need to do anything here? And regardless, if I did want to make these drives “4k-aligned”, what is the correct process to do so? Finally, I’ve noticed that the unmenu main page shows up for both my and my Dad’s unraid tower. However, if I click on a menu item, nothing happens. The only way I’ve been able to get the unmenu to truly work is to disconnect either of the two towers from the network. Question 3: Is there a way around this issue? Some setting I need to make? Thanks in advance!
Joe L. Posted December 12, 2011 Posted December 12, 2011 After the preclear has finished, but BEFORE you assign the disk to an array slot, you can use preclear_disk.sh -C 64 /dev/sdX to convert to a partition starting on sector 64 (4k aligned) The conversion just takes a few seconds. Joe L.
keyman33 Posted December 12, 2011 Author Posted December 12, 2011 Excellent! Thank you, as always, Joe. Did you, or anyone else have any thoughts on my Question 2 or 3? Question 2 is the more important one, really.
keyman33 Posted December 12, 2011 Author Posted December 12, 2011 I just searched a little better on my Question 2 and found this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10483.0 Essentially, the advice is not to mess with existing drives. However, it also seems to indicate that for new drives going in the system, to set them to AF in the "Disk settings" page. However, there doesn't seem to be a disk by disk setting. So if I go now and set the Partition format to "aligned", will it then still recognize my existing unaligned drive, and then begin to use aligned for all new drives?
keyman33 Posted December 14, 2011 Author Posted December 14, 2011 Thanks, dgaschk! Ok, one last question as I'm finally at the point of doing this work, as my 3x preclear passed. Would someone please confirm the order of operations, as I don't want to make an error at this point! 1. (from post above) Convert new drive that is unligned to aligned using "preclear_disk.sh -C 64 /dev/sdX" (this disk presently in Dad's Unraid system) 2. Set my Unraid server to 4k-aligned 3. Move new disk over to my system, removing faulty disk, following these directions on replacing drive: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Replacing_a_Data_Drive 4. Wait while unraid rebuilds the new disk, don't use server while this is happening. 5. Complete!
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