Hi Guys,

 

Just managed to get my unraid box up and running. I have installed 2 blank drives in my PC and did went through the menu to format it. I am bit worried that the drive hasnt been cleared because the whole process took 3 hours for a 2TB seagate LP drive. Is this correct and how can I check the drive clearing was success full?

I just completed running the preclear application on two 1.5TB drives and they took 18 hours each, thus I would say that you haven't precleared the drive as I you can expect it to take around 24 hours for a 2TB drive.    The technical guys will sound in when they have a chance. 

Just running the preclear scripts and its been clear at 106 MBps which is pretty fast. Will see if there is any failures in teh morning

Hi Guys,

 

Just managed to get my unraid box up and running. I have installed 2 blank drives in my PC and did went through the menu to format it. I am bit worried that the drive hasnt been cleared because the whole process took 3 hours for a 2TB seagate LP drive. Is this correct and how can I check the drive clearing was success full?

Clearing a disk in your PC will NOT make it bypass the clearing step in an unRAID server.  It will be cleared by the unRAID OS if it has not been pre-cleared by a program that writes a special signature to the disk.

 

There is a program I wrote that will perform that task.  It is preclear_disk.sh

You can use it to test any disk to see if a disk has the correct "preclear-signature"

 

you would invoke it as

preclear_disk -t /dev/sdX

where sdX = the device name being tested.  If you've already assigned the drives to your array then you cannot use the clearing script. (It will refuse to work on a drive assigned to the array)

 

You do not need to worry about unRAID's own clearing and formatting.  although I'd be very suspicious of 3 hours for a 2TB drive... That would be a write speed of 2000G in 180 minutes or 33.3Gig per minute, or 555MB/s.  (and NO disk I am aware of works that fast)

 

Typically the preclear_disk.sh script takes about 36 hours for a 2TB drive but then it fully reads the disk then writes the entire disk and then reads it once more.

 

Joe L.