Well I have started my Unraid project. I bought 2 6tb red drives and started a preclear its at 20 hrs for one cycle and only 60percent done step 2. I hope 3-10 go faster. People have talked about doing 3 preclears before commissioning drives. I understand doing that on a older unknown the state of drive but brand new? 3 times? I won't be building for a week.

 

Question 2.

There is a whole shit ton of options when it comes to formatting the drives. Moving MBR where to write bits all kinda stuff. Can someone give me a clear answer as to what I should format at. My drive setup is as follows

New 6 red paritity

drive 1 6tb red

drive 2 2tb old seagate

drive 3 1.5tb old seagate

drive 4 1tb old WD

I am playing the start up with reds then shuffle off and add the old drives after clearing I plan to preclear them 3 times before adding. I am using 6.1.6 Premium.

Question 3

I have a pair of OCZ 4 Vertexs 128gb that use to be my main drive, I have since upgraded. I wanna test them before commiting them to cache area. Is there a guide or something to testing ssds? I started doing searchs with little luck?

 

Jon

1. Personally I always do three pre-clear passes, especially with new drives. You could easily get one that seems to work fine just connected and sitting idle, but fails under stress. That's the kind of things that the pre-clear script is designed to point out. Yes it takes awhile to run it, but honestly that's less time than you would spend replacing the drive and rebuilding it a few months down the road when it fails.

2. I'm not a pro at the format stuff, but afaik the norm is to use something other than ReiserFS with new disks, but I don't think there is a reason to go through and reformat old drives with a new file system.

3. I don't think the pre-clear script is a good option for ssd's. I think these can be used without much "burn in". I don't have one in my system though, so I'll default to somebody with more firsthand experience.

The old drives have never been in a Unraid, So I am starting fresh with old drives.

Yes, pre-clearing large drives does take a long time. Better it fails before you trust your data on it. Drives tend to have a "bathtub curve" of life. They tend to fail more at the beginning and toward the end of their life. Pre-clearing helps get down in to the reliable part of the curve sooner than later. https://www.quora.com/What-causes-the-bathtub-curve-failure-rate-in-hard-drives

 

Typically most ppl just let unRaid format your drives with XFS. You'll see the format button in the GUI when you have an available drive. No need to mess with any other format settings.

 

I wouldn't preclear a SSD. What type of test result were you hoping to get? You can easily generate a SMART report by clicking the drive in unRaids GUI.

Do I pay attention of where I am putting the partition? before or after 63 bytes?

Do I pay attention of where I am putting the partition? before or after 63 bytes?

Only relevant for drives smaller than 2.2TB

Thank you for your answers. I have a follow up question.

My current builds cpu is g3220 on a z87x - u3h with 32gb of nonecc 1866 ram. I am considering looking at some xeons with ecc ram in the new year. Is moving my raid as simple as unpluging my various hardware and plugging it into a new cpu ram mobo? A guide to a hardware transfer would suffice for an answer but I can't seem to find one.

Yes - it is as easy as you describe.  As long as the disks and the USB drive are the same it should just be a case of boot up and go.

 

I suspect that is why nobody as ever bothered to write a specific guide for this