Preclear / copying station questions

[ashaneil]

So my server parts have been finally ordered. They should be here by this weekend. I have couple of questions on preclearing the drives and copying data on it.

 

1. Should I run the preclear script on the unRAID server, with the drive(s) already installed but not part of the array yet? Or should I connect the drive(s) to another computer and run preclear on it? I have a custom i7-2600k w/ 16Gb of RAM running Windows 7 or a Dell Optiplex 755 w/ 6Gb running Linux Mint 11. Any preference which to use?

 

2. How do you guys hook up the drives to be precleared? Do you install it in the machine and run the script or do it via USB 2.0 / USB 3.0 / eSATA?

 

3. I have about 6 TBs of data spread over 3 drives that I will be moving to the array before re-using those drives in unRAID (I will wait to make sure that everything is OK before formatting and reusing the drives). I have seen number of posts where people are experiencing really slow copy rates using TeraCopy. Is that still the way to go or it would make more sense to add a USB 3.0 / eSATA card to my unRAID server, hook the drive to the server via S.N.A.P, and then just run copy from telnet / ssh?

 

My build:

SuperMicro X8SIL-F-O with Intel 540 CPU and 8Gb or RAM in a Norco 4220 case.

[gtaylor]

1. I setup my unRAID server and then ran the preclear script on all drives before configuring the array. I ran three passes on each drive.

 

2. Install the drives in your unRAID machine.

 

3. I copied my data across using Teracopy and a USB SATA docking station. Copying across all the data from around six drives took several days. From memory the copy speed was roughly 20-25MB/s which is quite acceptable IMO. I set Teracopy to verify files as it copied. If your copy speed is slow then there is probably something wrong.

 

[ashaneil]

Thanks Gtaylor. I will try it and update when my server is ready. Cheers