Hello, everyone. I finished assembling my new Unraid server this weekend and installed the 'Preclear Disks' and 'Unassigned Devices' plugins so I could begin preclearing my drives and adding them to the array. I have 6 drives (5 HDDs and 1 NVMe) and started with my smallest HDD, a 6TB Ironwolf. As the preclear was progressing, I noticed the reads and writes to my Boot Device (a 32GB Samsung Fit Plus) were slowly ticking upward. After ~36 hours the preclear finished, and here is what my Main tab looked like:

 

 

7,281 reads and 11,357 writes on the boot device. Those aren't absurdly high numbers like I've seen in other posts, but they are much higher than what I think is normal or have seen in other's Unraid servers. It's been about two hours since the preclear finished and the reads have not increased and writes have increased by 10. So it seems like something was happening during the preclear. As a test, I just started a new preclear on a 12TB drive and like before the writes started increasing slowly. I've since stopped that one. What could be driving up these read/write numbers?

 

Hardware:

CPU: Intel I5-9600k

MOBO: Gigabyte z390 Aorus Pro

RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2x16GB 3200MHz (XMP disabled so it's running at 2666MHz)

 

Plugins:

Community Applications

Unassigned Devices

Preclear Disks

Fix Common Problems

NerdTools

*Unassigned Devices Plus

*Dynamix System Temps

*Statistics

( plugins with an * were uninstalled during the preclear to see if they were causing the problem)

 

And here is the diagnostics file:

vault-diagnostics-20201020-1307.zip

 

2 hours ago, Major2087 said:

As the preclear was progressing, I noticed the reads and writes to my Boot Device (a 32GB Samsung Fit Plus) were slowly ticking upward. After ~36 hours the preclear finished, and here is what my Main tab looked like:

 

7,281 reads and 11,357 writes on the boot device. Those aren't absurdly high numbers like I've seen in other posts, but they are much higher than what I think is normal or have seen in other's Unraid servers. It's been about two hours since the preclear finished and the reads have not increased and writes have increased by 10. So it seems like something was happening during the preclear. As a test, I just started a new preclear on a 12TB drive and like before the writes started increasing slowly. I've since stopped that one. What could be driving up these read/write numbers?

 

The preclear tool writes to the USB and has it's logs / resume files on there.

I'd assume this is so it can run independantly of the array being started, e.g. in maintainance etc.

 

I'm halfway throught the second step, 'write' on 3 parallel preclears and I'm at 19k USB writes since the reboot from installing the disks.

 

You can run all the preclears together, no need to do them individually.

 

 

 

True. I did find this forum post earlier where the OP noticed the same behavior I did, and limetech quoted someone's reply suggesting that plugins can do this.

 

I'm probably being overly cautious about the flash drive. I'll start on the other drives later tonight. Thanks for the reply.