February 18, 201214 yr Author ok thanks sync is nearly done so I'll find out soon if it is going to clear my drives, and I'll do my best to put down the matches and walk away.
February 18, 201214 yr Author it won't? so will the old data still be there somehow? if so, I haven't really achieved anything.
February 18, 201214 yr If you create a new partition and filesystem the old files won't be visible. They old files will still be on the hard drive but they don't show any more since the filesystem no longer has them recorded. You accomplished the same thing as just deleting the files off the hard drive. Peter
February 18, 201214 yr Author ok so i should have run the pre clear for like 30 hrs really to get rid of the old files? how come no matter what I can't make unraid do a write to zeros for the hard drives like it did when i first set it up and plugged in an 80gb drive which had a load of stuff on it? it cleared that drive and set it up ready to use for data storage, but I can't get that to happen again.
February 19, 201214 yr unRAID NEVER clears the drives when you create a new array. It only clears drives that are added to the array after it is created. Peter
February 19, 201214 yr Author oh right yeah, I know that, but I mean, when this parity sync is finished and the array is created is it going to clear the drive like it did after i created my first array with the 80gb drive when I first built this thing. because every time I've run newconfig and apparently 'started over' created a new array and ran a parity sync, it hasn't then gone on to clear the 2tb data drive. it's at 97% parity sync now so I'll find out soon if it's going to clear the data drive in a second, but should it? because I'm sure that's what happened when I created my first array with the 80gb data drive.
February 19, 201214 yr You can view the contents of the drive via a disk share. If it is currently included in the array as parity is being written, it will not be cleared. Adding a new drive to an existing array is the only time unRAID clears a disk.
February 19, 201214 yr Author ok so after everything that i've done, it says my 2tb data drive has 2tb free space, is this not true? are the files still there? same as if I had just deleted them off the hard drive? and if they are how much space are they taking up, if say there was about 10gb of files before i started all this.
February 19, 201214 yr The areas containing your files are mark as available for use. They take up no space. They are only technically still there.
February 19, 201214 yr Author ok good. this is probably more of a technical storage of digital data question but how can the files still be there and take up no space?
February 19, 201214 yr The space the files occupy is considered available. New files will be written over the old files.
February 19, 201214 yr ok so i should have run the pre clear for like 30 hrs really to get rid of the old files? how come no matter what I can't make unraid do a write to zeros for the hard drives like it did when i first set it up and plugged in an 80gb drive which had a load of stuff on it? it cleared that drive and set it up ready to use for data storage, but I can't get that to happen again. It will only clear a drive if you are adding it to an array that is already parity protected.
February 19, 201214 yr ok good. this is probably more of a technical storage of digital data question but how can the files still be there and take up no space? When you delete a file on any computer, you don't actually erase the file. You just tell the hard drive that it is OK to overwrite the file the next time it needs space. This is how most data recovery software works - it looks for data that is marked 'OK to overwrite'.
February 19, 201214 yr Author ok well i did everything that was said here, and the array was running, said 2tb of free space, both dots were green. I made a share called media. i opened a finder window and found Tower-SMB in the side list, opened up /media, made a folder called movies and dragged a file in. and it just hung there doing nothing and froze. Went to http://tower and disk1 has gone red dot so somethings obviously wrong even though this is a brand new drive so something I've done has ruined it. Now what? preclear the drives and start again?
February 19, 201214 yr You may have a bad drive. See here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting#Obtaining_a_SMART_report Try this suggestion..
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.