I had an old array running on v5 that ended up having two failing disks.  Here are the steps so far:

- copied off all the data

- removed failing disks from the system

- upgraded to v6 to take advantage of XFS and other perks

- pre-cleared remaining old disks with a one-pass sanity check

- pre-cleared one new additional disk

 

Today I created a new array, and hit the Start button.  It now says "Parity-Sync/Data-Rebuild in progress." with an estimated time of 13 hours.  What is it actually doing - formatting?   The status message seems erroneous since all the disks were zeroed out and have the pre-clear flags set.  It doesn't make sense to me that either parity syncing or data rebuilding should be occurring.

 

I see in the manual it says "Even before the devices are formatted, a parity sync will be performing in the background to initialize the protection of the array. Until the sync is completed, the array will operate but in an unprotected state. It is recommended to wait until the initial parity sync completes before adding data to the array."

 

So the order is pre-clear, then parity sync, then format disks?  I do want to use XFS, and hope I'm on the right track, but am currently somewhat confused at the order of events.

 

Unraid does not recognise the concept of a pre-cleared parity disk so the first time you start the array it will build parity.   You will probably still have to format the data disks to create their initial file system but this should only take a few minutes.

Ok, sounds good itimpi, thanks.

If all disks were cleread you could have checked "parity is already valid" before starting the array to avoid the parity sync.