December 21, 20178 yr I have been reading a lot in preparation of a HDD upgrade. One thing I need confirmation is: Can I remove my old parity drive and insert an upgraded parity drive and do a preclear on it. Ie is undertaking a preclear function on a new parity drive sensible whilst there is no functional parity drive in the array. Seems feasible to me Btw..My system is full and I cant add another drive without removal.
December 21, 20178 yr It is advisable to perform a preclear on a disk to confirm the disk is not going to die an early failure. Statisticlly a drive has a higher failure rate early in its lifetime then after the burn in period. The preclear gets the drive past the burn in. So I would recommend finding a way to preclear it using a different computer. It is pretty easy to boot unRAID and do a preclear on another machine. You could bypass the preclear. Chances are very good the disk is fine. If you do in maintenance mode, and there is a problem, you would be able to reconfigure the server with your old parity to do a rebuild. Just save a copy of the 'config" folder on the USB stick after you stop the array with the current parity in place. You are learning, though, that an unRAID server needs an empty slot. You might give some thought as to how to provide. For example, you can run cables outside the case to connect a drive. Having a well ventilated external enclosure is advised, but I have literally turned a hard disk on its back and run a preclear in an early server and that sufficed.
December 26, 20178 yr Hi SSD, I'm in the same situation. And awaiting a brand new HDD tomorrow... So I can just start an UNRAID trial on a different USB drive, boot my old dell in living room, and pre-clear it there? I do have a USB 2.0 enclosure but I think it'll take way to long to pre-clear a 10TB in that... I'm replacing my 4TB parity with this 10TB, and once it have redone the parity rebuild, i'm replacing my 1.5TB with the old 4TB parity. I think my next upgrade will be a PCI-E sata card to add a few ports so that I can pre-clear drives more easily in the future...
December 26, 20178 yr i recently precleared 8 TB WD red in a USB attached external enclosure. it will be my new parity (replacing 5 TB red) yeah, it takes days to finish. start now.
December 27, 20178 yr 12 hours ago, stefer said: Hi SSD, I'm in the same situation. And awaiting a brand new HDD tomorrow... So I can just start an UNRAID trial on a different USB drive, boot my old dell in living room, and pre-clear it there? I do have a USB 2.0 enclosure but I think it'll take way to long to pre-clear a 10TB in that... I'm replacing my 4TB parity with this 10TB, and once it have redone the parity rebuild, i'm replacing my 1.5TB with the old 4TB parity. I think my next upgrade will be a PCI-E sata card to add a few ports so that I can pre-clear drives more easily in the future... Yes - I don't like to preclear in USB enclosures unless they are well ventilated. And USB 2.0 would be painful. I don't even think you needed to start a trial (but it won't hurt). You should be able to preclear when array is not started.
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