Shucked... Shucks!


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Hi gang,

 

I got one of these bad boys on prime day

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01HAPGEIE/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

and proceeded to shuck it w/o reading up first...mah bad.

 

The drive is installed and Unraid sees it - Unassigned Devices shows it mountable.

When I try to mount it it fails with log:

Aug 05 12:24:53 Disk with serial 'ST8000DM004-2CX188_WCT00TD3' is not set to auto mount and will not be mounted...
Aug 05 12:24:53 Disk with serial 'ST8000DM004-2CX188_WCT00TD3' is not set to auto mount and will not be mounted...
Aug 05 12:34:26 Adding disk '/dev/sdo1'...
Aug 05 12:34:26 No filesystem detected, aborting.
Aug 05 12:34:26 Partition 'ST8000DM004 2CX188 WCT00TD3-part1' could not be mounted, aborting...

 

I no longer have the enclosure so I can't put it back together.

 

Is there a way to get this partition/mountable so I can do a pre-clear?

Or is it possible to buy another one, shuck the new one - then put this drive in and reformat?

 

Thanks!

 

 

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For future reference: The recommendation for buying an external drive is to plug it in via USB ad run a couple of pre-clear passes on it to assure yourself that you're past the infant mortality stage then take it out of the case & install it internally. It will take a bit longer to run but helps avoid moments of panic and not being able to return dead drives.

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4 hours ago, FreeMan said:

For future reference: The recommendation for buying an external drive is to plug it in via USB ad run a couple of pre-clear passes on it to assure yourself that you're past the infant mortality stage then take it out of the case & install it internally. It will take a bit longer to run but helps avoid moments of panic and not being able to return dead drives.

 

If you decide to do this (I don't for reasons below), make sure you keep the drive cool while it is actively preclearing in the enclosure. The hot USB enclosures definitely take their toll on a drive (hence the lower warranty). You really want the drive running in the 30s or low 40s during the preclear. Last I tried, when preclearing in the USB mode, you don't have access to the SMART reports and temperature (that was arguably a while back, so maybe things have changed). But I would blow a fan on the enclosure to keep it cool. If the drive is going above 45C, I'd look to improve the cooling. And if his is hitting 50C, I would stop it until you can find a way to preclear it at a reasonable temperature. The drive manufacturers rate their drives for very warm operations, but that is rated to keep the drive running for the warranty period. If you want to the drive to live well beyond that, my advice is don't operate it at high temps.

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We tend to think of a preclear as a quick test to verify the drive is not going to die an early death. But the truth is, we are exposing the drive to two full reads of every sector, and one full write. If you think about using a drive, say in a Windows workstation, that might represent a year or more activity. So three cycles (which I know some people like to give it), might be equivalent to the amount of writes a drive is likely to have in a lifetime. Even a single cycle might be equivalent to taking a car on a 50,000 mile test drive on a car treadmill to prove itself. How much of its lifetime would be consumed? And if instead we did it in the Sahara desert, how much then?

 

I did a study of this a few years back, and data centers tend to not do any testing of drives before putting into service. If they are going to fail, they will fail, and the redundancy of the storage arrays would allow them to be rebuilt. (And they do have backups.) But they are not using up useful life of the vast majority of the drives which are not defective. And their staff don't have to perform the tests - performing them is relatively costly.

 

I personally prefer to weed out the bad ones, and do a single cycle. The drive does need to be zeroed, so that part of it is unavoidable. And reads I feel are less impactful on drive life. (I do 12 full reads of every disk a year with parity checks.) And maybe I'm crazy, but I feel there is some therapeutic effect of putting the drive through the orderly read/write process. In my very unscientific experience, the few times I have not precleared, and just built parity with untested/unzeroed drives, I have been far more likely to have an early failure than on drives that I've precleared. So whether therapeutic, dumb bad luck, or my own imperfect recollection, I always run them through a single cycle. :)

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4 hours ago, BRiT said:

Now wouldn't you rather do the extensive testing while it's still under warranty conditions (ie: inside the external case)?

 

That's the trade off. If you preclear while inside, you risk high heat and diminished lifespan. If you preclear outside, you risk an early disk failure and difficulty returning a faulty unit. If the enclosures allow SMART data to be seen during preclear, and the temps are under 40C, and in the end the drive is precleared (USB controllers can play games with the drive geometry so drives don't appear precleared when shucked), it is probably a good idea.

 

I can't remember my last preclear failure, so I should probably do it or my number will come up with the next one! :) 

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