Hi - I am preclearing my drives and unsure about the preclear options. Below are my drives -

 

My parity disk is WD Red 3 TB and 3 data disks - a WD green 1.5 TB EADS, a Samsung HD204UI 2TB and Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB.

I have set the mbr to be 4K aligned from the unraid options menu.

 

My preclear command looks like -

./preclear_disk.sh -m myemail@domain /dev/sdX

 

My parity disk shows the sector starts at 1 while for all the 3 data disks, I see that the first sector starts at sector 63. Should I force -A option for the WD green to be properly aligned while have -a for the Sammy and Seagate? The documentation talks about using -A for the advanced format drives but how do I identify which of them are AF drives. It may be on the drive front face? (a pain to pull out from their cages).

 

Another unrelated question on the plugins -do I need to enable reinstall of the plugins every time I reboot them?

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just use the -A for all drives. It does not hurt the performance of the non-AF drives to use the -A but it can hurt the performance of the AF drives if you use -a. In fact, the non-AF drives work exactly the same formatted either way. So, using -A for all drives makes it safe.

 

On another note, you can use the -A for the 3T drives but it is ignored. 3T drives don't use the MBR formatting that 2T and smaller drives use so it's a non-issue for them.

 

There is another thing to note. The WD AF drives with the compatibility jumper installed must use the -a option. This is the only time it's necessary to use the -a option.

 

I actually think your only AF drive is the WD Red one.