Adding a new disk to array, it formated the disk and now it says unmountable and wants to format again?

[je82]

Hello,

 

I am trying to figure out how unraid works. This time i did with my lab:

 

Power of the system when everything was green.

Add harddrive physically to the machine.

Power on machine

Add the unassigned device to an open array slot.

Once array was mounted it asks for format the new disk to use it in the array.

 

Once this completed (took 4 hours) it now shows me the following:

 

 

Disk 3 is the new disk.

 

My question is, why is the new disk that was just formated for 4 hours asking to be formated again? I've set the default filesystem to be XFS Encrypted, so i took for granted that the system understood what was going to be done with the disk and i was asuming it was applying the encryption to the disk when it formated it for 4 hours but now it shows as unmountable (?) and it doesn't look like it used XFS Encrypted file system even though the config is set to have XFS Encrypted as default filesystem.

 

When inspecting Disk 3 it tells me "File system type: auto", what does that even mean? I figured auto = whatever default configuration in unraid is set to? What did unraid do for 4 hours?

 

Help me understand what i did wrong.

Edited October 26, 2019 by je82

[itimpi]

Was the disk pre-cleared? If not then the 4 hours was probably Unraid doing a ‘Clear’ operation (writing zeroes to all of the disk).   The format operation should only take minutes.

 

maybe there is a bug when you ask for format while a Clear operation is in progress?   If you have not rebooted perhaps you can post the system diagnostics zip file (obtained via Tools >> Diagnostics) so we can see what was going on?

[je82]

It was not pre-cleared, does pre-clear have to occur before adding a drive even though the drive was empty?

 

I did format now and you are correct, the format process was instant, it looks correct now.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 26, 2019 by je82

[je82]

Considering i have around 100tb terabyte of data to add to unraid and only 1 spare 8tb drive +2 parity drives that will be used for the project i would like to know the most efficient way of building the array one disk at a time.

 

What i have to do is start unraid with the 2x parity drives and the 1x 8tb drive i have spare, then move data of one of my 8tb drives and fill the 8tb drive in unraid, then power of, add the empty 8tb drive to array, and continue doing so until over 100tb is added.

 

What would be the best way of doing this? Am i doing this correctly or am i loading the system with a lot of uneccessary write/reads?

 

Thanks for the continous support!

Edited October 26, 2019 by je82

[itimpi]

Quote

It was not pre-cleared, does pre-clear have to occur before adding a drive even though the drive was empty?

A disk has to be all zeroes when added to a parity protected array to avoid invalidating parity (an ‘empty’ disk is not normally all zeroes).   Pre-clear is a way of doing this before attempting to add the drive and then the drive is available for formatting immediately.   If not pre-cleared then Unraid will carry out the required ‘clear’ operation when you add the drive and it cannot be formatted ready for use in the array until that completes.

Edited October 26, 2019 by itimpi

[je82]

3 minutes ago, itimpi said:

A disk has to be all zeroes when added to a parity protected array to avoid invalidating parity (an ‘empty’ disk is not normally all zeroes).   Pre-clear is a way of doing this before attempting to add the drive and then the drive is available for formatting immediately.   If not pre-cleared then Unraid will carry out the required ‘clear’ operation when you add the drive and it cannot be formatted ready for use in the array until that completes.

Alright, thanks for the info. I guess the pre-clear is a good way of finding out the drive is actually healthy if it is indeed writing to all the sectors.

Edited October 26, 2019 by je82

[itimpi]

1 minute ago, je82 said:

Alright, thanks for the info. I guess the pre-clear is a good way of finding out the drive is actually healthy if it is indeed writing to all the sectors.

Yes pre-clear is a good way of checking drive health as well as zeroing them.     The pre-clear takes longer than a clear as it also does read checks that the zero writes were successful whereas the simpler ‘clear’ only does the write of zeroes assuming they are 

oK if the drive reported no error.    Pre-clear can also be done without any effect on the array while it is running so can often be more convenient.