I'm building a new unRAID array and have what's going to be the parity drive hooked up to the only 6.0GB/s header on the motherboard. It's preclearing at 170MB/s (3TB in 13 hours!) and I'm wondering if it would be worth swapping out the other drives to that header for preclearing. I can't think of a reason why this would not be worthwhile, but honestly, it's never occurred to me before. Does the array care what header a drive was attached to? I'm assuming since preclear_disk.sh -t shows it's precleared state, that would be good regardless where else it showed up.

 

While I've got your attention, I'm working under the assumption that having the parity drive on the 6.0GB/s header is the best plan. Is there something I'm overlooking, some reason to follow a different plan?

 

Annnnnnd further wondering if I could preclear disks on different boxes, then add them all into a single array? Parallel preclearing, of a sort.

 

Thanks! (I'm using 5.0-rc8a)

sure, unraid doesn't care on which sata port a disk has been precleared. you could also preclear a disk on a completely different machine. (the information, that the disk is precleared, is directly on the disk)

also, unraid doesn't care, if you shut down your server and reconnect every disk to a different port. (only of v5)

 

it doesn't matter if your parity disk is on the fastest port, since the reading/writing on the parity is only as fast as the data disks currently used. but most disks (apart from ssd) can't even use the full speed of sata2... that's the reason, most of us don't care, on which port we do the preclear.

which 3TB disk are you using? would be interesting to know...

Thanks for the reply! Drive info below (hard to pass up for $70):

 

Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s

I had this thought on my way out to get kids from school, so it's not *quite* as lazy as it appears: can anyone tell me if preclear_disk.sh can run under any distro or just unRAID OS?

 

By the way, it's taking longer than 13 hours. Looks more like 18 hours.

It should work under any linux distro but I've never tried.

Well, it doesn't look like it'll work using my openelec box...

 

./preclear_disk.sh.1.13: line 196: /boot/config/disk.cfg: No such file or directory

'

 

It's looking for an unRAID custom config file. Boot with the free version of unRAID.

It's looking for an unRAID custom config file. Boot with the free version of unRAID.

 

Right. Done and it's chugging along at 33MB/s. That's certainly better than nothing! Thanks!