I have 1 parity and 5 data drives that are all 2 TB green Western Digital WD20EARS Advanced Format drives. I already set them up in unRAID without the jumpers from pins 7 and 8 in each drive. I found the information about Advanced Format Drives and how to put the existing drives into compatibility mode. I was not aware of the special configuration required for unRAID to work with Advanced Format Drives.

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Advanced_Format_Drives

 

I started with an error free parity check. Then I powered down the unRAID server and installed the jumper between pins 7 & 8 to put the data drive 1 in compatibility mode. The data drive rebuild process completed without errors.

 

I then started a parity check after completing the data drive 1 rebuild. There were 2 sync errors early in the parity check. So far, it is 43% through the parity check without additional errors.

 

Should I be concerned about the 2 sync errors?

 

I wasn't sure if I should complete the process of putting each drive into compatibility mode one by one, starting with data drive 1 or the parity drive. So, I started with the data drive 1. I plan to do the parity drive last. Does it make a difference what order the drives are processed?

 

It will probably take a week to put each drive into the compatibility mode, one by one, followed by a rebuild and parity check before processing the next drive.

 

Dave

 

Bump.  I had the exact same problem, and have the exact same question.  Are we able to salvage full speed on these drives once we've added them to the array, then removed them, pre-cleared them, and re-added them WITH the jumper? 

Other users have reported success following this procedure (install jumper before preclearing it). But there is some software alignment tool that some users have run (under Windows XP) that renders that effectively disables the functionality of the jumper.  My suggestion is to use the jumper and not use the program to provide flexibility in future drive use.

Help! I have trouble!

 

I built up my unRAID server using Advanced format Western Digital WD20EARS without the pins 7 & 8 jumpers. Then I went through the long process of running parity checks, removing one data drive at a time from the array, putting in the jumper between pins 7 & 8, adding the drive back to the array, and rebuilding the data drive. It took about a week to rebuild each of the five data drives, one at a time, plus rebuild the parity drive. After I got done, and along the way, the system takes about 20 minutes to start up, displaying hundreds of errors. After the system finally finishes booting into unRAID, I can connect with the web GUI. The files seem to be there. I don't know if all of the files are there. I had about 8.6 TB of files stored on the unRAID array.

 

I tried connecting one of the data drives to a Ubuntu 10.10 computer, and I cannot see any files. The Ubuntu operating system indicates that the data1 drive is formatted in Linux 0x83. The files on each data drive are supposed to be accessible with a Linux computer. I have not found that to be the case.

 

I could hook up all five data drives plus the parity drive again, and slowly copy the files off the data drives to secondary drives in a Windows computer. Eventually, I could move all the files off of the unRAID data drives to Windows data drives. Then I could rebuild a new unRAID array and copy the files back onto the unRAID computer.

 

From my understanding of unRAID, the files on each data drive should be visible from a Linux computer, which should make it possible to save the files onto storage drives on a Windows computer across my network. I could then copy the files back onto a 'clean' unRAID installation that is built with Western Digital WD20EARS drive that have pins 7 & 8 jumped before the drives are added to the unRAID array.

 

What is the best way to proceed and not loose my files? Should I be using a different Linux version to see my files? Is there something else I should be doing? My end goal is to have all my files stored on a stable unRAID system.

 

Dave

 

 

You could try rfstool directly from Windows no need to put drive in a linux box if I read the docs correctly anyway.  Never tried it so maybe someone else has a better tool for this.