3TB drive compatibility?

bru wrote:
When you look at cost I don't think spending the money on 3tb drives is going to be a good idea. They are going to be expensive as all get out, and the 2tb drives are dropping lower and lower.

But I already use 1.5TB disks and only getting 1.5TB of extra space by buying four more new disks is not that good in my books.

bru wrote:
With every bay you get the versatility of your device is going to increase.

That's true.

bru wrote:
For 2 3tb drives you might pay $300 a piece when they just come out.

Fair enough

bru wrote:
You might consider buying a better NAS ... something like the ReadyNas NV 4bay, or even springing for the great performing ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro.

Buying an extra NAS (and possibly a backup NAS for that) is probably what I'd do first, before upgrading to 3TB disks, but even then I may be a fairly early adopter of 3TB disks the way I'm going.

bru wrote:
then Also ... you can consider other alternatives like the DLink DNS-343 a 4 bay NAS that works pretty well, or even QNAP.

I'm used to the ReadyNAS and it does all I need. I think I'll stick with what I know.

bru wrote:
Every bay you add you get more of each disk contributed to actual storage ... the ratio (n-1)/(n) approaches 1 as you add more bays ... so with 2 disks, mirrored you use 1/2 the total space that you buy ... but with 4 disks you use 3/4 of the disk space that you buy. With the 6 bays in my readynas pioneer pro i get to utilize 5/6 or my disk space ... or 83% ... that is where the real savings are.

But once you start hitting 6 bays you need to start considering whether dual-redundancy is a good idea.
With larger capacity disks, dual disk failures are becoming more common.

bru wrote:
The migration can be tricky though ... and moving lots of data can take a long time.

Not tricky at all if moving between two ReadyNAS on the same platform:
http://www.readynas.com/forum/faq.php#How_do_I_migrate_disks_over_from_an_existing_ReadyNAS_to_another%3F.

Migrating data across your network from a Sparc ReadyNAS to a x86 ReadyNAS is doable. There are some issues to consider, but you can make it work.