I had 4 HDDs formatting for about 5 minutes but I then click on "settings" and then I came back to the disk screen and it had stopped formatting.

I am assuming I did something wrong. How do I get it to start formatting again?

I had 4 HDDs formatting for about 5 minutes but I then click on "settings" and then I came back to the disk screen and it had stopped formatting.

I am assuming I did something wrong. How do I get it to start formatting again?

It can be done in 5 minutes...  What other symptoms do you see that make you think that something is wrong?

 

Joe L.

My Hitachi 7K2000 fromatted in less than 1 minute!

 

Should I be preclearing my discs?

Should I be preclearing my discs?

Only if you care about your data.  From the posts from others probably 1 drive out of 20 has some issues.  Do you feel lucky?

 

Joe L.

I am at root@Tower:/boot# preclear_disk.sh /dev/hdk

 

but it keeps coming up sorry: /dev/ does not exist as a block device.

 

Can you tell me what to enter?

 

I am very new at this.

I am at root@Tower:/boot# preclear_disk.sh /dev/hdk

 

but it keeps coming up sorry: /dev/ does not exist as a block device.

 

Can you tell me what to enter?

 

I am very new at this.

unless /dev/hdk represents a disk in your server it will not exist.  "hd" devices are affiliated with IDE disk controllers. 

 

To see your "device" names type

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

 

identify your disk by its model/serial number  At the very end of the line for each disk is something like ../../sdb

Ignore those lines with a 4 character ID with a trailing number.  You want the three character hdX or sdX (if an SATA drive) where X is a letter from a through z.

 

Then the device name you would use for preclearing disk ../../sdb would be

/dev/sdb

for ../../sdh it would be

/dev/sdh

 

 

I have got it now thanks!!

 

But I have made an error where I am only preclearing one hdd as I have just discovered Alt F6. Is there a way to stop the preclear?

You can stop it at any time and then start over. I've never tried it but control-c should work. Alternatively you can leave the console task running and telnet from another computer to start additional clears.

I'm sure you've seen it before, but I would most definitely use Joel L's preclear script. When I was testing unRAID for the first time to see if it was worth all the hype because I'm always a worry wart about things I ran it and right away it told me I had a disk that was going to die.

 

Sure enough within hours of being installed the disk failed and I lost data. Of course I knew it was because preclear beat it up enough and I'm glad it failed to prove it works.

My first hdd precleared in 26 hours. It came up with the following "SMART error count differences detected after preclear note, some "raw" valune may change, but not be an indication of a problem"

53c52

 

<    1 raw read error rate   0x000b  100  100  016  prefail  always

        65536

 

>    1 raw read error rate   0x000b  100  100  016  prefail  always

        0

 

 

This is a Hitachi hdd.