Migrated to new case - adding back previous replaced drives

[Swixxy]

i recently decided it was about time my server moved home into a much larger case (24 bay). During the time my servers been online i've upgraded drive sizes a few times - Most recently swapping out some old 2TB drives for new 6TB ones.

 

I know these drives are working fine, and id like to add them back into my server. I know that if i turn off my array, and then hit 'clear' it will clear the drive, format it to xfs and then resize and start the array. However this takes quite a while (hours) and id rather not have my array offline for that long.

 

Could somebody help me with a command or something that i can use to format the disk to the xfs and clear it ready, so if i include it in the array it will only take the array resize time (few minutes)

[itimpi]

I assume that you are talking about minimising the array down time?  If so you might want to look into running the pre-clear script against these drives prior to adding them.  That keeps the array downtime to minutes as it avoids the need for unRAID to run its Clear phase.

 

Note that the formatting to XFS in this approach does not take place until after the drives have been added and the array started, but this only takes minutes and the array is available during the process anyway.

[Swixxy]

I assume that you are talking about minimising the array down time?  If so you might want to look into running the pre-clear script against these drives prior to adding them.  That keeps the array downtime to minutes as it avoids the need for unRAID to run its Clear phase.

 

Note that the formatting to XFS in this approach does not take place until after the drives have been added and the array started, but this only takes minutes and the array is available during the process anyway.

 

Yes i am indeed talking about array downtime.

 

These drives have already been precleared before they went into my server originally - so they are known to be fine working drives. I'm more wondering if theres a faster way to do this without essentially testing every bit of the drive (since this has already been done)

 

Edit:

Looking at the preclear script it seems it actually has the -n command that says it skips the bits im talking about. Apologies for not looking into it properly. Thank you

[lionelhutz]

It's not testing, it's clearing every bit or switching it all to zero so that parity is not broken. And yes, there is a switch that you use to only write zeros to the disk and skip the pre and post reads if you want it to go faster.

[garycase]

You've already answered your own question here.  Just use the pre-clear script with the -n option => that takes about 1/4th the time of a full pre-clear cycle