How do I fix an unjumpered EADS that shoud have been jumpered

Well, I told my brother in law about the great deal newegg had on a 2TB EADS drive.  I forgot to mention to him that it may need to be jumpered.  I got an EADS that did not need a jumper and he got an EADS drive that needs a jumper.  Here is the problem.  He already added the drive as the parity drive  .  He did not run the preclear_dsik.sh script. He added the drive with just unRAID alone.  How do I fix this? 

 

CJ

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=8754.0

I did see that thread, but my brother in law's situation is a little different.  He already added the EADS drive without the jumper as the parity drive. 

 

I am assuiming that I can leave the EADS assigned as parity.  Is this how I should proceed? 

 

Run this command : dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=500 (where /dev/sdX is the EADS drive) 

Power down. 

Add the jumper.

Run this command : dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=500 (where /dev/sdX is the EADS drive) 

Then perform "initconfig"

 

CJ

Is he complaining of performance issues while writing to the array and/or performing parity checks?  If not, there is no reason he has to add the jumper.  It is a little unclear to me if issues with the 63 sector alignment affect the parity drive in the same way as the RFS formatted disks.  If his write performance is north of 25 MB/sec and parity speeds > 50mb/sec, I'd consider leaving it alone.  Switching carries some risks.  A drive could fail while rebuilding parity - resulting in losing that disk's worth of data.  The risk is low but the impact substantial.  Also, many users have had issues with this switch (although the procedure outlined has been known to work for many users, there is still a risk that he'll have trouble).

 

Likely something will be done with unRAID relatively soon (of course no guarantees) to address the 63 sector alignment issue on larger/newer disks.  When that happens, it may be that users are required to remove the jumper (or, at a minimum, not required to add the jumper), and whatever he does now may have to be switched again.

I thought the parity drive is a RFS formatted disk.  That is why I was concerned about not having the jumper on the drive.  He is not complaining about performance since he is new to unRAID and never had a NAS before.  I just didn't want an unjumpered EADS drive to cause any issues down the road.  If this is only a performance related issue, then I am not as concerned.  I didn't know if this unjumpered drive issue would cause data integrity issues with unRAID.  Since my brother in law just swapped out his parity drive with the EADS drive two days ago, I wanted to find out if I need to fix this right away.

 

CJ

 

I thought the parity drive is a RFS formatted disk.  That is why I was concerned about not having the jumper on the drive.  He is not complaining about performance since he is new to unRAID and never had a NAS before.  I just didn't want an unjumpered EADS drive to cause any issues down the road.  If this is only a performance related issue, then I am not as concerned.  I didn't know if this unjumpered drive issue would cause data integrity issues with unRAID.  Since my brother in law just swapped out his parity drive with the EADS drive two days ago, I wanted to find out if I need to fix this right away.

 

CJ

 

If you load the disk with data and then change the jumper, the data will no longer appear on the disk where it is expected, so to the OS, the data is garbled.  As long as you do not change the jumper setting, the data will be fine.  If you do decide to change the setting of the jumper, the data on the drive will need to be re-constructed onto its correct locations on the drive so it can be found.

I thought the parity drive is a RFS formatted disk.  That is why I was concerned about not having the jumper on the drive.  He is not complaining about performance since he is new to unRAID and never had a NAS before.  I just didn't want an unjumpered EADS drive to cause any issues down the road.  If this is only a performance related issue, then I am not as concerned.  I didn't know if this unjumpered drive issue would cause data integrity issues with unRAID.  Since my brother in law just swapped out his parity drive with the EADS drive two days ago, I wanted to find out if I need to fix this right away.

 

CJ

 

 

The parity drive actually has no format.  Is is simply the sectory by sector, bit by bit parity calculation across all of the drives in the array.  It may be that it sufferes the same issues as an RFS drive, but not 100% sure.  Would actually be interesting to get some performance numbers from your brother in law.