Hi All,I have a query. I bought 2 of these 2TB green drives (WD20EARS-00MVWB1 WD Caviar Green 2TB). I know there is a lot of complaints about them, but they are a very decent price and that capacity is just what I need as I run out of space on my 1TB Duo drives.Here's the thing. Backing up everything to an External USB drive is PAINFULLY SLOW on the Duo, even with fast writes enabled. I am stunned by how dreadful it is. It's actually quicker for me to copy across the network and hop via my desktop PC to the USB drive!! Anyway, it has taken me absolutely days to get through a lot of the data on my NAS drives... but I'd like to know if the following is possible:I'd like to pop out the 1TB drives and put in the 2TB green drives. Do the whole config thing (4k firmware write?) and set up on the new drives and then copy whats on the USB drive back across onto the NAS with the new 2TB drives in it.If I should pop these out and put the old 1TB drives back in... will they still work with all the old data there? It may sound lame, but I'd like to get most of my data up and running on the new 2TB disks and slowly move the remaining old data later since it takes SOOOO damn long to copy off to USB.What do people think? Should I be able to swap between pairs of 1TB and 2TB so long as drives maintain their slot numbers, etc?Thanks

Yes you can power down and put the old drives back in.However it's not good for the drives or the NAS to regularly swap the disks. You should backup your data now and keep the 1TB drives for a while just in case there's a problem with your backup, not instead of a backup.

Hi There,Thanks for the advice. I only intend to do this to get things up and running in my end state. I'll probably only swap back once and then do a final run of data copies. I'm basically putting off the backup/copy off of probably 600GB of AVI files... that is going to take foreevvveeeerrrrrr! I dread to think how long it will take given the time it took to do the 400GB of other stuff...I also like your idea of holding onto the 1TBs for a bit after the new disks are in place...

Well, this made me laugh... 6 days, 22 hours for 545GB of data, all large files... Pffff...

If you are copying over the network to an external drive attached to a PC, it should be much faster. Many times that calculation is way off. May times when copying large files from my NAS to my PC it will tell me it's going to take 24 hours (half way through after 5 minutes, only to have it complete 5 minutes later!). I have a tendency to pay far more attention to the number of files left vs total and number of giga/mega bytes left vs total. It would be interesting how long it actually takes.

Yep, sadly that's exactly what I'm doing. I dread to think what the time would be locally attached to the ReadyNAS.Currently running at a pretty constant 1,015kb/s. I haven't seen any fluctuations in the amount of time left or files remaing.Would be nicer if my Netgear router was gigabit, but unfortunately its only 100MbitHere's another question though come to think of it... Does the copy from a locally attached USB on the ReadyNAS go any quicker since its a read rather than a write operation?

Drive Upgrades - WD20EARS-00MVWB1 WD Caviar Green 2TB

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mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Jan 07, 2012
If your PC has a gigabit ethernet port and your router is only 100Mbit, then yes a direct-connection should be a little faster. See http://sphardy.com/web/directconnect

Btw, I should have asked what version of RAIDiator are you running?

Should also have mentioned that your version of the WD20EARS is not on the Hard Disk HCL. The Notes for the WD20EARS in the compatibility list are quite clear.

thekuttingedge

Aspirant

Jan 08, 2012

If your PC has a gigabit ethernet port and your router is only 100Mbit, then yes a direct-connection should be a little faster. See http://sphardy.com/web/directconnect

Btw, I should have asked what version of RAIDiator are you running?

Should also have mentioned that your version of the WD20EARS is not on the Hard Disk HCL. The Notes for the WD20EARS in the compatibility list are quite clear.

PC has a gigabit port, but yes the router is the bottleneck. Regardless of other factors, 5MB/s is pretty much what I'm getting for the copy jobs.

True, this version of the WD20EARS is not on the HCL, but I am aware of a great many people having successfully installed and used them. The main thing as I see it is that I have not taken the in place expansion route to using these disks, I have done a complete swap of both disks. Thus far, while really only being used to pump my old data back on to them, the disk have performed just fine... unless there is something else I may be missing at this point.

RAIDiator v.4.1.8 - though I did read somewhere that there is a beta version 4.1.9, but I would rather have a final product than introduce another issue from beta firmware.

Obiwan_
Apprentice
Feb 12, 2012
I installed 4 of them (WD20EARS-00MVWB0) in my ReadyNAS 1100 w/ 4.1.8 firmware with success. I just read about the 8 second head park issue and looked at the LCC on the drives. With only 61 hours on the drives Drive 1 is 1170, 2 is 104, 3 is 100 and 4 is 90. How do I shut off the autopark or set it to a reasonable number? Or should I just return them and get something else?

Thanks, Kent

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Drive Upgrades - WD20EARS-00MVWB1 WD Caviar Green 2TB

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