Hello, I have on order some new hard drives for my array. Here is my plan so you know what I am doing.

 

Replacing 2TB parity with 4TB parity

Replacing 2TB Data Drive with 3TB Data Drive.

 

I still have room to use the replacement drives in my array. These drives (2tb) were used since UnRAID 4.7. I am positive I PreClear'ed my Parity back when I installed it on 4.7. However I am unsure if I ran PreClear on that 2TB data drive in question.

 

What I want to know is after I get my new drives preclear'ed,.... The old 2TB data drive that I am going to use to expand the array (it could be preclear'ed) can I just preclear it again to be sure I have done so.

 

To sum it up, can you preclear a drive as much as you want (this situation I am just unsure if it was)

 

Thank you

Yes, you can preclear as many times as you want. It servers as a good stress test for the drive; it just takes time. Opinions vary as to how many cycles you should run but 3 seems to be a popular choice for new drives.

Right on, in the past anyways I have just usually ran one, and it seemed ok. Wanted to check regardless, thank you.

Since these are well-used drives, you may want to simply use the -n option, which will just do the actual pre-clear, skipping the pre and post reads (takes about 1/4th as long as a full cycle).

 

Then, after you add the drive, do a parity check, which will effectively do the post-read AND confirm all is well with everything else at the same time.

 

Thanks graycase, I will use the -n, thanks for the heads up, I am pumped. I love that my server is running super stable again. Going to expand it and get working on PLEX on it :-)

 

I always do a parity check before adding drives and after, good looks much appreciated! I can't thank the community enough