Earlier this week I set up an experimental 5.0-beta2 server (after many many hours reading through helpful forums threads). I have experimented with it quite a lot and feel I know a little about unraid now but I'm still new to this so I apolagize in advance if what I am reporting is normal.

 

On 2 separate occasions with different sets of hardware I've been able to create a new array without performing the "clearing" step. the first time was using 3 1.5TB drives on my "primary server". the second was using a spare system I had laying around. Here is what I did the second time:

 

- format and load up flash drive using unraid 5.0-beta2 basic

- connect HDDs (2 drives, 500GB for parity 320GB data disk)

- boot off USB

- go to the webgui > Settings > Disk devices

- assign the drives then click Done

- go to Main page and Start the array

- after a few seconds, I refresh the page then I click Format to begin formatting the 320GB drive (all the while, the parity sync appears to be already running in the background)

- the parity drive shows an orange ball next to it, the data drives shows green. the readout says "Formatting" on the line corresponding to the data disk

- after < 5 minutes, I can refresh the page and the data disk shows up as "Formatted". done. finished. i can transfer data to the array (it is still running the parity sync though)

 

Isn't the clearing step (writing all zeros to the drive) supposed to take a long time?

I looked in the syslog and there appears to be some issue with mounting the file system. see attached.

 

the drives I am using have NOT been precleared using the preclear_disk.sh script and these drives were both completely full of data (parts from a win7 NTFS RAID server I recently dismantled) just before I began so I know they have not been cleared.

 

please note: I only observed this with the Basic edition. yesterday I purchased a Pro license and when I added a disk to an already created array in Pro, the drive took 10+ hours to format/clear (as I would expect).

 

Is the purpose of clearing the drives strictly for preserving parity? if so, I guess it makes sense the drives in the newly created array (prior to finishing parity check) should bypass the clearing, right? I just want to make sure my array is set up properly before transferring all my data to it.

syslog.txt

until you have assigned a parity drive the clearing will not occur.  as you said, it is for preserving parity.

 

Joe L.

easy enough. thanks for confirming.