Looking to fit 3TB Enterprise drives to ReadyNAS Duo or NV+

if you have an ARM based duo/nv+ with 'dashboard 5.x', then 3+ tb drives should be fine.

if you have a SPARC based duo/nv+ with 'frontview' and raidiator 4.x, then 2tb is the largest that will work.

with any 4 bay device, you could use 'flex-raid' mode to manually setup 2 separate mirrored volumes, note however the default is x-raid mode which would essentially be the same as a single raid 5 volume. You would need to choose flex-raid mode at the beginning of a factory reset.

Ah, that answers my question then - I have Radiator 4.1.8 on my Duo.

How can I easily identify an ARM based Duo / NV+ when shopping for them? I am looking at an NV+ on Dabs which has a Marvell 1.6GHz processor, is that ARM?

jonnymorris wrote:
I am looking at an NV+ on Dabs which has a Marvell 1.6GHz processor, is that ARM?

yes.

the sparc based devices should be mostly out of retail, but I would think they would be alot cheaper than more current devices, if there are any left. Also the sparc cpu is like 280 or 400mhz or something like that.

Thank you very much for your swift and very useful replies.

I have a further question or two, now that I have my NV+ V2 but have yet to purchase drives.

I am looking at the 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000, which I know is not on the HCL but others seem confident in the Hitachis. I am sure the Seagate would also work, but that is a whole 1TB less space, and more than twice the price (what am I paying for with the Seagate?), so for the price of two Seagates I could fill my NV+ V2 with 4TB drives, mirrored that should make close to 16TB! Is that correct?

If I fit just two of the 4TB Hitachi drives to start off with, would I run into problems later if, somehow, 8TB hard drives came into being and I wanted to fit either 2x 8TB for mirrored drives or 4 x 8TB for a single RAID volume?

Could I fit a single hard drive which I intend to match with an identical hard drive later for a mirrored volume?

How much space would 4x 8TB give me as a single RAID, potentially, if the NV+ V2 could handle them after having two mirrored volumes of 2x 4TB drives each?

I have read another thread about a 6 bay ReadyNAS that has an upgrade limit of 4TB I think above the original factory installation - is this only when upgrading an existing RAID, would the same limitation apply to a mirrored volume (replace one of the drives with a larger one, sync, then replace the other in the same mirror)?

Could the 4TB upgrade limit be bypassed by performing a factory reset with much larger drives in?

What is the practical limit for hard drive size for the current NV+ V2?

-I would go with the WDC W30EFRX over a Seagate consumer drive. Google the forums on the drive model before you purchase. Regrettably the HCL is not as good a guide as it once was.
-If you take a hint from the ReadyNAS 4200 HCL, then you might also consider a WDC RE WD4000FYYZ. That is an enterprise drive, and is the first 4 TB model to be on the HCL.

I do not have first-hand experience with the Hitachi or the WDC 4TB drive. I have several W30EFRX and am pleased with them.

-The growth limit (from your initial install/last factory default) is 8 TB, not 4 TB. There is also a hard stop at 16 TB total volume size. So if you started with 4x3TB XRAID2 (RAID-5), you'd have about a 9 TB volume. You could grow to 4x4TB, since that would take you up to 12 TB. The hypothetical 4x8TB would give you 24 TB with RAID-5. Assuming they worked with the v2, you'd need a factory default - which would give you the full space.

-You can alternatively create mirrored drives (2 volumes on the system). You'd need to choose flex-raid at the initial install. Of course, two mirrored volumes (RAID-1 pairs) won't give you the same capacity as RAID-5. With mirrored pairs, you could expand from two 3TB pairs (6 TB total) to two 8 TB pairs (16 TB total). I'm not certain if the v2 will expand each volume (as XRAID-2 would), or if you'd need to create additional volumes to use the extra space. You'd also be able to destroy the volume and start over.

ext4 volumes have a limit of about 1 million TB. So the practical limit could be your wallet.

Check this thread out before you do......Those drives (WD WD30EFRX) certainly don't work reliably at the moment with my firmware 5.3.7 on the ReadyNasDuo V2 ....

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=69815

Sound like there's possibly an issue with 5.3.x firmware.

mdgm wrote:
Sound like there's possibly an issue with 5.3.x firmware.

Yes. Also its not clear that this is related to the drive model.

Thank you for the heads up on the WD drives / 5.3.x firmware problem, could be an incompatibility between the drives firmware and the ReadyNAS firmware, doesn't say much for the HCL as these drives are on it. Honestly, never been much of a fan of WD drives anyway. I think I'm going to give a pair of the Hitachi 4TB drives a go, 7K4000, see how they fare as a mirror.