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Preclear.sh results - Questions about your results? Post them here.


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using Corsair 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10666 XMS3 DHX Memory Kit ram

and a GByte GA-880GA-UD3H MoBo AM3  motherboard

 

settings are default

Telling me the MB and RAM does not really help.    I can tell you I drive a Toyota, and I use regular gas... That tells you nothing about the air-pressure in the tires, or the amount of tread on them, or if they have a slow leak.

 

You cannot just rely on the BIOS.  Too often the BIOS will set the speed, voltage or timing wrong, especially if you use premium RAM which needs special timing, clock speed or voltage.  Normally, DDR3 ram uses 1.5 volts.  Your strips need 1.6.  It might be as simple as that, or your timing could be off too.

 

According to newegg, your ram needs:

Speed  DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

Cas Latency 9

Timing 9-9-9-24

Voltage 1.6V

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Just got these final results from a preclear (as shown in MyMain)...

 

Preclear Successful

... Total time 38:34:45

... Pre-Read time 9:46:21 (85 MB/s)

... Zeroing time 9:53:09 (84 MB/s)

... Post-Read time 18:54:05 (44 MB/s)

 

Why is the post-read slower than the pre-read?  Just curious...  thanks.

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Just got these final results from a preclear (as shown in MyMain)...

 

Preclear Successful

... Total time 38:34:45

... Pre-Read time 9:46:21 (85 MB/s)

... Zeroing time 9:53:09 (84 MB/s)

... Post-Read time 18:54:05 (44 MB/s)

 

Why is the post-read slower than the pre-read?  Just curious...  thanks.

Because post-read is verifying what was written is all zeros.  Pre-read is not verifying, it is just sending the contents read to /dev/null as existing contents could be anything

 

Is that a 3TB drive?

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Just got these final results from a preclear (as shown in MyMain)...

 

Preclear Successful

... Total time 38:34:45

... Pre-Read time 9:46:21 (85 MB/s)

... Zeroing time 9:53:09 (84 MB/s)

... Post-Read time 18:54:05 (44 MB/s)

 

Why is the post-read slower than the pre-read?  Just curious...  thanks.

Because post-read is verifying what was written is all zeros.  Pre-read is not verifying, it is just sending the contents read to /dev/null as existing contents could be anything

 

Is that a 3TB drive?

 

Thanks - make sense.  Yes that one is a Hitachi 3TB green drive running off the SATA port on the motherboard (Supermicro X8SIL-F).

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Ran preclear (used the -A option) and there were no apparent reallocations but I got this failure. What is it telling me is wrong with my drive?

 

WDC WD10WACS-00ZJB0 WD-(drive serial # here)

 

Disk /dev/sdc has NOT been precleared successfully

 

skip=121200 count=200 bs=8225280 returned 41849 instead of 00000

 

No SMART attributes are failing now

 

Thanks in advance for any insight.

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Ran preclear (used the -A option) and there were no apparent reallocations but I got this failure. What is it telling me is wrong with my drive?

 

WDC WD10WACS-00ZJB0 WD-(drive serial # here)

 

Disk /dev/sdc has NOT been precleared successfully

 

skip=121200 count=200 bs=8225280 returned 41849 instead of 00000

 

No SMART attributes are failing now

 

Thanks in advance for any insight.

It indicates one of the blocks of zeros written to your drive was not read back as all zeros.

in other words

dd if=/dev/sdc  count=200 bs=8225280 skip=121200  | sum

did not return a sum of zero.

 

This can be caused by a bad disk, bad memory, bad motherboard chipset, or a bad disk controller,  or even a bad power supply.

 

The issue is you cannot trust values written to that disk unless you isolate if it is the disk, or something else.  In any case, that same type of error will cause random parity mismatches.  You'll run parity checks, and there will randomly be errors, and if you have multiple disks you be pu;;ing your hair out trying to find the root cause.

You can try the command above "dd" command again, but I would do another pre-clear, preferably on a different disk controller port, to see if the disk can be successfully written and then read.

 

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Thanks for the quick response and explanation. That drive was in a SansDigital 4 disk port multiplier box attached to a SiL3132 controller. I had successfully precleared 2 other disks in that box but will remove this one and try on a motherboard port. If that works I will suspect the HDD slot in the SansDigital and do some testing on it.

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Thanks for the quick response and explanation. That drive was in a SansDigital 4 disk port multiplier box attached to a SiL3132 controller. I had successfully precleared 2 other disks in that box but will remove this one and try on a motherboard port. If that works I will suspect the HDD slot in the SansDigital and do some testing on it.

These types of issues cause hair-loss.  Because you can pull your hair out trying to locate the random elusive parity error after you assign the drives to the protected array.  It is exactly why the post-read test was added to the preclear script... because one unRAID user had a disk drive that would occasionally not return what was written, but not show any other error of any kind.

 

In other  words, if installed on a MS-Windows box, you would never notice an occasional program crash or blue-screen.  But here, on unRAID when every bit is checked on a drive, we notice, and care.  At least you know not to trust the array(or disk) until it can be pre-cleared and entirely read back correctly.  Remember, it only takes 1 mis-read bit out of trillions to cause the post-read error you encountered.

 

The interesting part is, each sector has its own checksum on the disk, so it was apparently read correctly, and the  SATA communications has its own error checksum when communicating with the disk controller, so it is not likely the cable, but that leaves the cache memory in the disk, the disk electronics, the controller electronics, the power supply, the memory in the server, the motherboard in the server, and pretty much everything except the  mouse connected to the server as suspect.

 

I'd start with the easiest, a memory test, preferably run overnight.  If the server cannot pass that, nothing else matters. It needs to be corrected first.  The memory might just not have the correct Voltage, Timing, or clock speed, especially if it is premium RAM.  Some BIOS set those parameters correctly automatically, some do not.

 

Joe L.

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I ran the previous version (v1.11) of the preclear script before seeing that the the beta v1.12 was supposed to be used for 3TB drives. Here are my results, must I do a preclear again with v1.12 ,and are the results OK?

 

root@HPTower:~# dd if=/dev/sde  count=200 bs=8225280 skip=121200  | sum
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
00000 1606500
1645056000 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 19.8377 s, 82.9 MB/s

 

I am using a Seagate Barracuda® XT 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB cache (ST33000651AS)

 

Thanks

preclear_start__9XK0H2MB_2011-07-08.txt

preclear_rpt__9XK0H2MB_2011-07-08.txt

preclear_finish__9XK0H2MB_2011-07-08.txt

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I ran the previous version (v1.11) of the preclear script before seeing that the the beta v1.12 was supposed to be used for 3TB drives. Here are my results, must I do a preclear again with v1.12 ,and are the results OK?

 

root@HPTower:~# dd if=/dev/sde  count=200 bs=8225280 skip=121200  | sum
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
00000 1606500
1645056000 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 19.8377 s, 82.9 MB/s

 

I am using a Seagate Barracuda® XT 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB cache (ST33000651AS)

 

Thanks

 

A 3 TB drive has an entirely different signature when pre-cleared.  It  will not be recognized as pre-cleared  if cleared with 1.11

 

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Ok, so I'll re-run the the preclear's on the drives.

A couple of questions going forward:

  • What am I looking for post running the pre-clear to know that the drive has been sucessfully pre-cleared?
  • When  adding the drives to the array, (this is a new config, all drives including parity are new) I should expect to be able to use the format function on the data drives, and have the drives ready within a couple of minutes to allow the array to be started?
  • Does the subsequent creation of parity then still take quite a long time after the array has been started?

 

Thanks

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Ok, so I'll re-run the the preclear's on the drives.

A couple of questions going forward:

  • What am I looking for post running the pre-clear to know that the drive has been sucessfully pre-cleared?
  • When  adding the drives to the array, (this is a new config, all drives including parity are new) I should expect to be able to use the format function on the data drives, and have the drives ready within a couple of minutes to allow the array to be started?
  • Does the subsequent creation of parity then still take quite a long time after the array has been started?

 

Thanks

1. It will tell you the preclear was successful

2. After assigning the drives to the array, it will present a "Format" button.  It takes a bit of time for 3TB drives, but probably under 10-15 minutes.  It does run slower if multiple are being formatted at the same time.

3. Parity creation runs at between 60 and 100 MB/s on most modern hardware (it is near the limit the disks can be read).  

If you figure 10 seconds per Gig, and you have 3000 Gig with a 3TB drive, that translates to 30,000 seconds.

Therefore you can estimate a time of somewhere near 8.333 hours, or longer if your parity calc speed is slower.

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Again same problem.  When I re-attached my screen session I see this:

 

Elapsed Time:  14:09:49

./preclear_disk.sh: line 1079: 0+()%(243201) : syntax error: operand expected (error token is ")%(243201) ")

========================================================================1.11

==  ST32000542AS    5XW1CTY2

== Disk /dev/sdi has been successfully precleared

== with a starting sector of 64

 

 

I can't imagine this is correct because 14 hours for 3 passes isn't possible on a 2TB drive.  Any ideas?  I am using the latest preclear scripts 1.11 I think.

 

Thanks!

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Again same problem.  When I re-attached my screen session I see this:

 

Elapsed Time:  14:09:49

./preclear_disk.sh: line 1079: 0+()%(243201) : syntax error: operand expected (error token is ")%(243201) ")

========================================================================1.11

==  ST32000542AS    5XW1CTY2

== Disk /dev/sdi has been successfully precleared

== with a starting sector of 64

 

 

I can't imagine this is correct because 14 hours for 3 passes isn't possible on a 2TB drive.  Any ideas?  I am using the latest preclear scripts 1.11 I think.

 

Thanks!

nope... looks to me like it stopped responding.  does it respond to a smartctl report?

It could be the disk, the cable, the power, the backplane/drive tray.  We've seen them all.    It has not been successfully pre-cleared.  Trust me.  try

preclear_disk.sh -t /dev/sdi

and see what it says.  Only takes a few seconds to test if it has a pre-clear signature.

 

 

Joe L.

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Again same problem.  When I re-attached my screen session I see this:

 

Elapsed Time:  14:09:49

./preclear_disk.sh: line 1079: 0+()%(243201) : syntax error: operand expected (error token is ")%(243201) ")

========================================================================1.11

==  ST32000542AS    5XW1CTY2

== Disk /dev/sdi has been successfully precleared

== with a starting sector of 64

 

 

I can't imagine this is correct because 14 hours for 3 passes isn't possible on a 2TB drive.  Any ideas?  I am using the latest preclear scripts 1.11 I think.

 

Thanks!

nope... looks to me like it stopped responding.  does it respond to a smartctl report?

It could be the disk, the cable, the power, the backplane/drive tray.   We've seen them all.    It has not been successfully pre-cleared.  Trust me.   try

preclear_disk.sh -t /dev/sdi

and see what it says.  Only takes a few seconds to test if it has a pre-clear signature.

 

 

Joe L.

 

When I attempted to preclear the drive another time I would get disconnected!  I ended up rebooting the machine again.  I will check it out.

 

 

The one drive just doesn't show up so that drive is definitely bad.  I ran that command on these two WD drives but they were previously used on another installation.  I ran the preclear and I don't know the results but when I ran that command I got the response:

 

==

== DISK /dev/sdi IS PRECLEARED with a starting sector of 64

==

 

I guess how do I check to make sure the drives are good?  Preclear again?  Can I look at the contents of that drive?  Thanks!

Thanks,

 

Neil

 

 

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A 3 TB drive has an entirely different signature when pre-cleared.  It  will not be recognized as pre-cleared  if cleared with 1.11

 

I've completed the V1.12 preclear script on my first Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB, results attached.

 

dd if=/dev/sdb count=200 bs=8225280 skip=121200  | sum
00000 1606500
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
1645056000 bytes (1.6 GB) copied, 22.4087 s, 73.4 MB/s

== Disk /dev/sdb has been successfully precleared
Pre-Clear unRAID Disk /dev/sdb
################################################################## 1.12
Device Model:     ST33000651AS
Serial Number:    9XK0AXMG
Firmware Version: CC44
User Capacity:    3,000,592,982,016 bytes

Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1  4294967295  2147483647+   0  Empty
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
########################################################################
========================================================================1.12
==
== DISK /dev/sdb IS PRECLEARED with a GPT Protective MBR
==
============================================================================

preclear_start__9XK0AXMG_2011-07-15.txt

preclear_rpt__9XK0AXMG_2011-07-15.txt

preclear_finish__9XK0AXMG_2011-07-15.txt

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Can some one please interpret these results and advise if I should use this drive.

 

 

WDC WD5000AAKS-65TMA0    WD-WCAPW2103990

Disk /dev/sdd has been successfully precleared

ATTRIBUTE  NEW_VAL OLD_VAL FAILURE_THRESHOLD STATUS      RAW_VALUE

Current_Pending_Sector =  200    194            0        ok          20

Multi_Zone_Error_Rate =  188    188          51        In_the_past 830

No SMART attributes are FAILING_NOW

492 sectors were pending re-allocation before the start of the preclear.

492 sectors were pending re-allocation after pre-read in cycle 1 of 1.

0 sectors were pending re-allocation after zero of disk in cycle 1 of 1.

20 sectors are pending re-allocation at the end of the preclear,

a change of -472 in the number of sectors pending re-allocation.

99 sectors had been re-allocated before the start of the preclear.

99 sectors are re-allocated at the end of the preclear,

the number of sectors re-allocated did not change.

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

 

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