So - I started a preclear on a drive while it was in an external usb enclosure - needless to say it has been SLOW (48hours for 2tb)

its on the last step, the post read- rather than wait the additional 24+ hours to finish, can i stop the process, pop the drive out of the enclosure and resume once on the sata bus?

 

Also, the drive will be a new parity drive - so would it need to finish the post-read step for that? Would assigning it take the array offline for the clear if i dont let the preclear finish?

 

the reason i ask is that the remaining disks are at about 95% and getting this 2tb running will let me get a bit more space and keep using the array

 

i hate rushing things, but knowing its cleared give me confidence in the drive (that and the fact i used it as an external for ~6 months with no issues)

If you run pre_clear script without any parameters it will give you options for running particular phases.  Sounds as if you want to run just the pst-read steps?

You can't "resume" the pre-clear, but you can, as noted, selectively run parts of it.

 

However ... since you've already used the drive for 6 months, if pre-clear hasn't shown any issues at this point, it's reasonable to assume the drive's okay.    You may just want to just install it.

 

And no, there won't be a clearing phase for a parity drive -- it will simply rebuild parity onto the new drive.  DO, however, run a parity check on the drive to ensure all is okay BEFORE you remove the old drive !!  Hopefully you've already done that while the 2TB drive was pre-clearing.

 

Yep, parity check is all good, no errors on anything at this point.

 

I'll stop this when i get home from the office and then begin the slow process for the rebuild

 

Thanks guys!