Is there any way to mass preclear drives (without purchasing another pro license)?  I know you can use screen and preclear a lot of drives at once if you have higher than the basic version but when you have your production servers up and running and don't want to mess with them, it would be nice if there was a preclear version of unraid that would only allow you to preclear say 6 drives or up to 10-12 but not allow you to use the array function.  It's only function is to preclear drives.

 

Currently I'm using the basic version which I can preclear 3 drives at the same time but I have 20+ drives I'd like to preclear and taking 20-30 hours to preclear only 3 drives it will take a long time to do that unless I build more basic systems.  When I have a drive fail in my production servers I don't want to preclear a drive using it.  I know preclear isn't a "real part" of unraid but having something like a preclear only version would be beneficial to some people and shouldn't require much coding to leave out the main guts of the unraid system itself.  Or maybe such program already exists?

haven't messed with Basic in a long long time.

 

But, I'm not sure you are limited to 3 drives to preclear. The Basic limits you to 3 Drives in the array. But since preclear checks to ensure the drives being cleared are NOT in the array, you should not be limited.

 

Have you tried preclearing more than 3 drives at a time on the Basic?

If so, what error/warning do you get?

 

there is no limit to how many drives you can pre-clear at a time in ANY version of unRAID.  They are not assigned to the array, therefore the license that limits the number of disks in the array has no impact.

 

You might be limited by the amount of memory in your server unless you use the -r -b and -w options.

 

You might be limited by the number of simultaneous login sessions if you use putty and clear one drive per session(by default, you can only have 8 root logins at a time via telnet)  Instead, use "screen" and one telnet session.

You're right.  This was my issue.  I didn't have the other sata ports enabled in the BIOS.  My apologies.