icon123 Posted January 13, 2011 Share Posted January 13, 2011 My unraid server isn't ready yet. Is there any problem in starting to preclear drives in another PC running a free version of Unraid? Link to comment
kizer Posted January 13, 2011 Share Posted January 13, 2011 No, There shouldn't be a problem with that. Your unRAID build is not tied to the preclearing of the drive. Its the excercise thats inportant. Link to comment
icon123 Posted January 13, 2011 Author Share Posted January 13, 2011 How about on a Gigabyte MB not knowing if I could turn off HPA? Link to comment
Joe L. Posted January 13, 2011 Share Posted January 13, 2011 How about on a Gigabyte MB not knowing if I could turn off HPA? If the BIOS adds an HPA, you'll know it. Just look in the syslog. preclear has no way to remove it, you'll need other utilities for that. it just clears the "advertised" size of the drive. (and with an HPA, it will be smaller) Furthermore, if precleared with an HPA and then the HPA is removed, the pre-clear signature will be invalid. There is no inherent danger in using a drive with an existing HPA. The danger is in having the BIOS add one later, after the drive is assigned to an array. The HPA it adds will occupy about 2Meg. It is not worth the bother as long as you don't try to replace a full size drive with the slightly smaller one later. If the HPA is added later unRAID will see the disk as a different disk and take it off line. If it adds the HPA later it could clobber part of your file system. Go ahead, clear the drives. Joe L. Link to comment
Rajahal Posted January 13, 2011 Share Posted January 13, 2011 Right, several of my older drives have HPAs from an old Gigabyte mobo. I just leave them as they are. It isn't worth my time and effort to get back a few bytes. Link to comment
SSD Posted January 14, 2011 Share Posted January 14, 2011 The only time the HPA is a problem is if it is on the parity drive. The parity drive must be the largest disk in the array, and despite the fact that HPA takes only a small amount of space, it does reduce the size of the disk to below that of other drives of the same size. This prevents unRAID from allowing the drive to be parity. Link to comment
icon123 Posted January 14, 2011 Author Share Posted January 14, 2011 Its all good. HPA was turned off and preclearing the 2TB EARS drive for the past 10 hours. I assumed I was to jumper it at this time. Unfortunately my MB slated for unraid was also a Gigabyte that I can't turn the HPA off on. Therefore, I will we awaiting my new Asus for Monday delivery. Its too bad to, I really like Gigabyte boards. Link to comment
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