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Initial Hard Drive Preparation

Preparing Your Hard Drives for Use

  One of the very best tools we have today to ensure both the longevity of our new hard drives and the reliability of those drives is to zero them out before putting them to use. Burly Storage advises that every drive be zeroed before use to be certain of the drives quality and performance. If you don't wish to zero the drives formatting instructions are available below.

  The process of writing zeroes over the entire surface of the drive not only tests the drive completely, to be certain of its quality from one end to the other, block by block, but makes the drive faster and more dependable by burning them in. Comparing the amount of time each drive takes to complete the zeroing process gives us a great confidence as to whether each is fully and equally capable. All else being equal, good drives will take almost exactly the same amount of time to write a full pass of zeroes. Other processes being run simultaneously may effect the times, so care must be taken what else the computer is used for during the zero out process.

  Today's hard drives are capable of doing their own housekeeping during operation. This means they can repair bad blocks all by themselves. To accomplish this they will go offline, make the repairs, and return to service, all autonomously and outside of our control. This process can take 30 seconds, 40 seconds or even over a minute to accomplish - an eternity in computer time. Writing a pass of zeroes over the entire drive forces this process to completion before ever using the drive for time sensitive data. This is critical for streaming media like audio or video drives since any interruption will cause dropped frames or a stutter.

Pretesting Drives for RAID

  Zeroing your drives is especially important before putting the drives into a RAID array where each and every component drive plays a part in the overall performance and reliability of the array. In the event of any performance problems in a RAID array it is nearly impossible to determine which drive is causing a problem when all them are working as a group. Determination of a particular drive issue cannot be accomplished without breaking the array down and testing each component separately. By prequalifying your drives before building the RAID your results willl have a better chance of meeting expectations. And in the event of a performance problem - breaking the array down and testing each individual drive by zeroing it out is probably the best possible test.

How to Zero on a PC

  An easy application to use for zeroing drives on a PC is Western Digitals DATA Lifeguard software, downloadable free. Double click the drive you want to zero and choose Write Zeros from the pop-up menu. Verify the drive you wish to zero because any data on the drive WILL BE LOST.

How to Zero on a Mac

  Apple kindly gave us the best tool for this in Disk Utility. Using the Erase function, we can select 'Security Options' and hit the radio button for 'Zero Out Data'. Hit 'OK' and then Erase and the process will start. This can take over an hour with large drives and you will want to monitor how long it actually takes via the progress bar. Verify the drive you wish to zero because any data on the drive WILL BE LOST.

Zero Multiple Drives Simultaneously - On a Mac

  A great little trick to know: you can run multiple copies of Disk Utility and do more than one drive at a time. This will save you considerable time if you are zeroing out a monster 8 or 10 drive RAID array. If you hold down the Option key you can drag copy Disk Utility to a second location. 'Option' makes it a copy process, without the Option key you are only moving the application. As long as you choose a different location or folder to copy to you can run 3 or 4 copies all at once.

  On Port Multiplier Systems we would recommend you only zero a maximum of three drives simultaneously per port multiplier, two is best. More than that you will effect the time each drive takes because of too many accesses over a single data channel. Because we want to monitor each drive, and its performance in relation to all other drives (hopefully identical), we want to limit the variables as much as possible.

  With Firewire you can only zero a single drive at time because of bus constraints. Two drives simultaneously zeroed will take twice as long as one drive on a Firewire bus. Keep it simple on your Firewire drives and only zero one at a time.

  Keep an eye on how long the drives each take to Zero. At the bottom of the Disk Utility window is an estimated time to completion. Each drive should both estimate, and in actuality take, the same amount of time within a minute or two unless other processes are hogging resources or bus access. Here's what you will see at the bottom portion of a Disk Utility window during a zero all erase:

Drive Formatting Instructions

Windows 2000, NT, XP and Vista

  If you're using a Lycom card you'll first have to manually initialize any new drives before they will appear in Disk management. Please see the Lycom section below.

1. From the START manu right click on "My Computer" or "Computer" for Vista users. Choose "Manage" and hit "continue" if the User Account Control window appears.
2. Double click "Storage" then "Disk Management". All initialized drives should appear in the right lower corner as bar graphs. They will not be included in the drive list at the top until they are formatted.
3. At this point you must verify which drive you choose since it's possible to damage or erase drives that have data on them. Keep in mind that your exsisting drives may be mixed in with new drives.
4. Right click in the box on the left side of the drive bar graph, the box should say "Disk-X". Choose the "New Volume" option, this should start the New Volume Wizard.
5. Choose the type of RAID you wish to build. If you want a JBOD (Each drive as an individual volume) choose "Simple".
6. If you're building a RAID add the number of disks you want to include in the volume.
7. Assign a drive letter that will not be duplicated even by a drive that's not currently attached to the computer
8. Choose the File System you prefer, usually NTFS. Leave the allocation size set to default. Name the volume in the "Volume Label" bar. If you wish to save time you can choose the "Perform a Quick Format" button at the bottom.
9. You will have to repeat as needed for individual drives or multiple arrays.
10. Once completed the drive should show up in My Computer and elsewhere.

If using a Lycom Card on a PC

  The Lycom card should come with a CD that includes an application you'll have to install to manually initialize any new drives. This "SATARaid5" software is on the CD as well as a Java application to run it. On the CD you will find a file called "RAID5 SATAII_4Port". Open this file, double click the Sil3124 icon, then choose which type of Windows you're running, 32 or 64 bit. Open the GUI file. Within you will find a PDF which is the Users Guide for the card. The other file is the application you must load. Once loaded it should show up on your desktop.

  Open the "SATARaid5" application with your enclosure attached and powered up with the drives installed. You should see a group of boxes, each a location for a drive on the card. You should see the same number of colored boxes as the drives you have attached. From the menu bar at the top choose "RAID Group", then "Create RAID Group". This will allow you to initialize the new drives so that the OS can see them. A Create RAID Group window will appear. Make sure that the Configuration is "Contiguous" and change the Capacity menu bar to "MAX". This will initialize the whole drive. Now highlight a drive in the window at the bottom and hit "Create". Do this for each drive shown in the lower window. You should find that each box that was gray is now green. Now please refer to the PC section above to create your RAID 0 or 1.

Formatting drives on a Mac running OSX   

1. Open a Finder window, Applications, Utilities then start Disk Utility.
2. The new drive should be listed on the left side of the window. Hi-light the drive (Not the volume, the drive is the top line with the drive model number). Verify the drive you wish to format because any data on the drive WILL BE LOST.
3. Click on "Erase" at top of the window. Choose what format type you wish to use, name the drive and hit erase at the bottom. Once the formatting is complete (15-20 seconds) the drive should show up in a Finder window.
4. If you wish to RAID the drives, in Disk Utility hilight the first drive and choose RAID at the top.
5. Choose the RAID Type you need, format type and name the volume.
6. Drag the number of drives you wish to include in the RAID into the box at the right. Click on the Create button.