I was curious.  I am about to buy a 10TB hard drive.  Is it still good practice to pre-clear the drive.  If so, then how many times should it run through that process.  My Unraid has WD Green 3TB hard drives and I am going to start upgrading them.  So of course I will be starting with the Parity drive and working my way up from there.

2 hours ago, SidebandSamurai said:

Is it still good practice to pre-clear the drive. 

Yes. No. Depends.

 

Preclear is probably one of the most thorough methods to test a new drive for defects, but it's hardly the only method. Any testing method that verifies the entire drive capacity is error free is fine. The manufacturer typically has tools that will test the drive, even just a long smart test will give some indication if the drive is not healthy.

8 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Yes. No. Depends.

 

Preclear is probably one of the most thorough methods to test a new drive for defects, but it's hardly the only method. Any testing method that verifies the entire drive capacity is error free is fine. The manufacturer typically has tools that will test the drive, even just a long smart test will give some indication if the drive is not healthy.

I personally like to burn-in  new drives with 3 cycles of "Esase and Clear" routine of Preclear Plugin. It will fill the drive with random data, followed by writing zeroes to all of it, an then read the disk to see if it's in fact zeroed.

Thanks for the answer, the reason I asked is with the new 10TB drives it could take longer than a week to actually verify the drive once.  I like using 3 cycles as well.  I was just checking to make sure this is still the standard practice.  I built my system with 3TB green drives when they were all the rage.  Now that its full, instead of adding more drives, I thought to upgrade them.  I will move the 3TB drives further down the array as I upgrade each drive so they will not sit on my shelf.