4k Sector Confirmation

First - the WD20EARX is not on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for the Duo. This does not mean it will not work, just that it has not cleared the testing process. If you have problems and contact Tech Support they can refuse help because of the unapproved drives.

Second it looks like you have gone to a single drive. This provide no redundancy in case of a drive failure.

The drive itself is where the 4K sectors are set up. This drive will always have 4K sectors. The problems were in the fact that a factory default was not done when the drives were installed. Sounds like you have done that.

I agree with PapaBear. It does sound like you did the factory reset and have 4k sector partition alignment. See Why you might want to factory reset a Sparc ReadyNAS

I checked the partition log earlier today and thought it didn't look right as it showed a starting sector 1*512 as the sector sizes as follows:-

Disk /dev/hde doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/hdc: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdc1 32 4096031 2048000 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc2 4096032 4608031 256000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdc3 4608032 3906992335 1951192152 5 Extended
/dev/hdc5 4608040 3906992335 1951192148 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hde: 2000.3 GB, 2000388448256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243200 cylinders, total 3907008688 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20460800

I also spoke to Netgear Tech support, no offense, but no one knew much about the issue. Western Digitial conversation at least gave me the idea to remove drive and check it with WDAlign to determine what the NAS had done and on checking it showed 4 partitions and no alignment.

I therefore uninstalled all partitions in windows and quick formatted to confirm alignment was in place using WDAlign. I then put HD back into the NAS and made sure reset pin was down on start-up. NAS LED's blinked 3 times during the circa 47 seconds button was depressed (wanted to be sure). Deviceis currently now working, I presume, on installing system although it seems ot be taking a bit of time.

G

If you looked at my article you would see that your partitions are 4k sector aligned. Do note that the log zip file is designed to be read by NetGear tech support. The utility used to generate partition.log measures 1 sector as 512-bytes (this is a good idea as if they used a larger unit non 4k sector aligned disks would have decimals for start sectors in the log) but as 4k (4096) = 8 * 512, you can see that the disks are 4k sector aligned as the start sectors are divisible by 8.