trevorp

I'd like to add what I've noticed in regards to interruption of streaming while writing to the array. For me, interruptions of streaming appear to be network related, not unRAID related. When I had a gigabit network, I could write from multiple sources, and stream to multiple clients with no problems. I moved recently, and have temporarily set up MoCa to get my network everywhere easily. Now I experience intermittent interruptions when writing to the array, and streaming to one single client. Writes happen from a PC on the same gigabit switch as my unRAID server, so it's not that writes are using up all my MoCa bandwidth. I guess with the MoCa networking, I just don't have enough spare bandwidth to fill my buffers and keep them full. It's also extremely noticeable when skipping ahead during playback. What before was an instantaneous jump now takes a bit to start playing. This is all to be expected with as dramatic a reduction in networking I have had. Maybe something to look into for people experiencing the problem? It may not be the case for everyone, but it certainly appears to be in my case. Also of note, I'm no 5.0-beta14, not one of the RCs.

It certainly makes sense to split off and come over here, and not pollute the pre-clear thread. Though I'm capable of writing my own scripts to do all of this, my scripting is somewhat rusty at this point, and if you're willing to share your scripts as you've indicated, I'm all for that! I'll check back in later when I can be more coherent.

Wow, you have WAY more hard drives than I do, and are WAY more thorough than I am. Now I feel like a jerk for not running monthly badblocks tests on the drives. Thanks for making me feel like a jerk! Now I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

This may be an old topic, but since I just voted, I figured I'd weigh in here with my rationale too. I used to only pre-clear once. Then I bought a WD30EZRX drive from Newegg. I pre-cleared it as usual. Reading the output of the pre-clear script, I noticed it said that I had 3 sectors pending re-allocation before the run, and 4 after pre-read cycle 1. It ended with 35 sectors pending re-allocation. So I fired up round 2. After it was done, I had 42 sectors pending re-allocation. Round 3, and the drive vomited all over my syslog and got yanked. I don't have the results, as it never finished, but if I recall it was in the multiple tens of thousands range. The replacement drive survived 3 rounds of pre-clearing fine. I just purchased 2 more WD30EZRX drives, one of which survived the 3 rounds of pre-clearing fine, and the other was so DOA it never even started the pre-clear cycle. I think I'll be switching to the badblocks + pre-clear method from here on out though.