4TB disks on ReadyNas Ultra 6?

fastfwd wrote:

marky wrote: if you are willing to factory reset, you can put 6 x 4tb hard drives in the Ultra 6 and have a usable volume thats > 16TB?? Yes, you can put all 6 drives in and then factory default. If you choose to format your RAID array as RAID-5 (single-disk redundancy), you will end up with an array of approximately 20TB. Doing that, though, is probably a bad idea. When a drive fails in a RAID5 array, your data will be unprotected from further failures until you replace the failed drive and rebuild... But with an array that large, it would not be unexpected for an error to appear on one of the other drives during the rebuild. A better plan would be to format the 6x4TB array as RAID6, which will provide two-disk redundancy. You'll "only" get 16TB, but your setup will be much more reliable.

Thanks for the reply. I plan to upgrade the ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition which currently has 6 x 1.5 TB to 6 x 4 TB. Due to budget constraint current thinking is to go with 6 x ST4000DM000, which would put me outside of the HCL (which only lists one 4 TB HDD, HUS724040ALE640). And will be setting up the volume as RAID6.

I guess question for the forum is, ST4000DM000 is 4 TB yes, but at 5900 RPM (not 7200 RPM). Use of the box is primarily for streaming HD videos and backup purpose. The box is not on 24x7 but only when its being used, eg. streaming movies and storing/retrieving backup.

Would 6 x 5900 RPM HDDs be practical for eg. HD video streaming? I would think, yes, given relying on 1 GbE networking.

Thanks much.