I've been adding more drives to my unRAID server lately as I've been able to free up the drives from my Windows and Linux based servers, and the biggest 'pain' of the process for me is the drive clearing step. The unraid array has to be taken offline during the whole process, and nothing can be done to the server during that period.

 

In the interest of decreasing downtime to the unraid array, can anything be done? Either of the two below would be good:

a). Is it possible to have the array online during clearing process?

b). How about 3rd party utilities that we can run on a different pc (windows or linux) to clear out drives? As I understand it, clearing is a zero-out process of existing drives and I think I've seen a similar option from those drive-erasure programs. Can we use that?

Yes I agree that has not been implemented very well, and has been bugging me from day one.  Look for a changes in this area in the next release (4.1).

Yes I agree that has not been implemented very well, and has been bugging me from day one.  Look for a changes in this area in the next release (4.1).

 

Awesome, I can't wait for 4.1.

Was this ever implemented?

If so what is the procedure to pre-clear drives before adding them to array?

(I'm trying to avoid down time, waiting for new drives to clear)

 

If I missed this in another post, please redirect me, I did look

 

Thanks

You did not miss it, as far as I know, it was never changed.

 

Tom?  Is this still on your to-do-list?

Tom sells (or at least used to sell) pre-cleared drives.  He has some tool that he runs to clear the drives that updates the MBR in a special way so that unRAID knows it is pre-cleared.  He has said a couple of times that he was going to package it in future unRAID releases, but I think he just fogets and has never done it.