Hey 

 

Right now i'm running a media server/nas on windows 10 pro. 

 

I have been thinking about switching to Unraid and in that regard i was wondering if i need to preclear (test) my drives before using them in unraid. I'm talking about a 4tb wd red nas 256 gb ssd.

 

I have been runnning the 4tb red nas drive for about a year without problems.

 

What would you recommend? 

 

Thanks in advance 

I assume from the way you wrote the post you are aware that all drives you assign to unraid will be erased. Not relevant to the testing bit, just making sure you realized it.

 

For testing, you could use the WDDiag suite and run an extended test, then look at the smart data, all while still in windows.

 

Running for a year in windows is NOT a good test, as only the parts of the drive in use will have been "tested". Unraid requires every bit of the drive to be good, even the unused bits, in order to recreate a failed drive. Preclear is a good way to verify the entire drive is good, it reads and writes the entire capacity and verifies the results.

 

SSD's should not normally be precleared, there are smart commands and tests that are just as effective. For now, SSD's are not recommended as members of the parity protected array, as there is no way to do the normal SSD maintenance on array members. They should be used either in the cache pool or as unassigned devices.

Thanks for the reply.

 

 

I'm well aware that every data will be erased. 

 

I'm planning to use the SSD as cache. In the beginning I will not be using any parity drive until I buy a new 6 tb drive.

 

 

I'm assuming you referencing theData Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows 

 

 

 

 

7 hours ago, jonathanm said:

I assume from the way you wrote the post you are aware that all drives you assign to unraid will be erased. Not relevant to the testing bit, just making sure you realized it.

 

For testing, you could use the WDDiag suite and run an extended test, then look at the smart data, all while still in windows.

 

Running for a year in windows is NOT a good test, as only the parts of the drive in use will have been "tested". Unraid requires every bit of the drive to be good, even the unused bits, in order to recreate a failed drive. Preclear is a good way to verify the entire drive is good, it reads and writes the entire capacity and verifies the results.

 

SSD's should not normally be precleared, there are smart commands and tests that are just as effective. For now, SSD's are not recommended as members of the parity protected array, as there is no way to do the normal SSD maintenance on array members. They should be used either in the cache pool or as unassigned devices.

Do you know if there any other benefits of running with a parity drive besides the protection of your data? Does transfer speeds differ?

31 minutes ago, fc0712 said:

Do you know if there any other benefits of running with a parity drive besides the protection of your data? Does transfer speeds differ?

Write speeds are lower with parity.

 

I know you said you plan to add parity later, and that's fine, I don't recommend running more than one data without parity though. And you should keep backups for any irreplaceable data regardless.