February 21, 20206 yr So I recently purchased a 6TB Blue drive to expand my array. I understand from reading certain topics in the past that the preclear step isn't required anymore, but I like to do it anyway (old habits die hard). While preclearing my disk (WD60EZAZ) the UI reported that the drive was doing the pre-read at +393MB/s. AFAIK it is impossible for spinning disks to read data that fast. Not that I'm complaining per se I just want to make sure nothing is wrong with the disk. I was running the preclear add on from within the webUI for the disk above as well as a shucked one at the same time (WD80EMAZ). The other disk showed common speeds (100-200MB/s for r/w) Has anyone else seen this type of behavior before? Thanks in advance for any clarification anyone light offer.
February 21, 20206 yr That because those SMR drives don't read the platters when they know there's no data there, do a full write and then you'll get the actual read speed from the platters.
February 21, 20206 yr Author Ok. So I need to load some data onto it first. It had me worried when it finished in 1/4 the time it took an 8TB drive to do the same. Thanks!
February 21, 20206 yr Yeah, they are weird like that, even the long SMART test completes in a few seconds before they are used for writes.
February 21, 20206 yr And because of that there's no point in doing a pre-read when pre-clearing a new one, just clear and post-read.
February 21, 20206 yr Author Yea I noticed that the pre-read finished in a few hours but after it cleared the disk and zeroed everything the verification took a while. I tried to read the long topic about the SMR drives but it seed like the consensus was that they're good to use as data drives if I understood correctly.
February 21, 20206 yr They are usually fine with Unraid, they should be avoided for any kind of RAID.
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