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

jonnymorris wrote:
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.

Either way you are getting a WD drive. Hitachi became part of WD a year ago (8 March 2012).

"could be an incompatibility" is of course true. And this post "could be an incompatibility" between 3 TB Hitachi drives and the x86 NAS: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=69855&p=387516&hilit=volume+check#p387516

Both conclusions would be (IMHO) premature, as there very few reports of trouble with either of those drives here. I have no hands-on experience with the Hitachi's, but I am running 6 WD30EFRX drives in various NAS, and so far they have worked flawlessly.

Anyway, I think both choices are solid. Let us know how it works.

Yes but you are not running those wd drives on a readynas duo v2 so the parameters are different Stephen

Have you tried running different model 3TB drives in a ReadyNAS Duo v2 brinzlee?

StephenB wrote:
Either way you are getting a WD drive. Hitachi became part of WD a year ago (8 March 2012).

Yes, but I have also read that this drive is still an Hitachi design and model, not yet 'WD-ified', presumably WD won't have pushed out the Hitachi designers and engineers just yet.

brinzlee wrote:
Yes but you are not running those wd drives on a readynas duo v2 so the parameters are different Stephen

I understand that, and I am sympathetic about your issue.

But from what I am reading in your posts, it isn't at all clear from your symptoms if your problem is related to specific drives at all. File systems get corrupted for a variety of reasons, and automated repair doesn't always work. Even if your problem is drive related, right now it still is just one person's bad experience, and some drives from every model/manufacturer fail.

Show me enough posts to form a real trend, and I'll change my view. But right now, I see lots of posts from people who are successfully using these drives, and I am not seeing much (really not any) drive-specific issues reported.

Compare the WD30EFRX posts with the posts on the ST2000DL003 for instance.

jonnymorris wrote:
StephenB wrote: Either way you are getting a WD drive. Hitachi became part of WD a year ago (8 March 2012). Yes, but I have also read that this drive is still an Hitachi design and model, not yet 'WD-ified', presumably WD won't have pushed out the Hitachi designers and engineers just yet.

Hard to say.

People have had good experiences with Hitachi in general, so I think they are certainly fine to use. Hopefully they will be added to the HCL.

@mdgm no I haven't used any other drives other than I know I had no issues with the 2tb ones. And @stephen I'm sure you do see lots of cases but could that be due to the fact that the wd red 3tb drive doesn't fall into an affordable catergory for home usage using the readynas duo v2 as they are still quite expensive for home use and most other users of this particular drive are being used in other models of readynas units. I am in the process of reverting to 5.3.6 to see if it might just be a bug in 5.3.7. Failing that the case will be escalated to support level 3 as I am all out of ideas.
Thanks for all your constructive comments though.

5.3.6 didn't make any difference....I can reliably make the fault occur at 50% volume capacity and create a volume error list as long as your arm....To level 3 support now and beyond !!!

In response to my original question, I have taken the plunge and am currently running two 3TB Seagate enterprise class drives in a new NV+ V2 without problem thus far. I have copied about 500GB of files to it from my old Duo so far, it hardly blinked (apart from an odd permissions problem on a few of the files, still trying to resolve that, I can only imagine it is something on the Duo end).

The drives are Seagate ST33000650NS, they run at around 40 degrees C when idle and are quieter than the 1TB ST31000340NS drives I have in the Duo V1.

The NV+ V2 runs very quiet considering the size of the fan, perhaps with four drives in it chugging away the fan will run faster, currently it runs at a leisurely 1365 RPM, the smaller fan in the Duo runs at around 1705 RPM.

I did look at Seagate's 4TB enterprise class drives but they are ridiculously expensive, I don't know what critical systems they would be worth installing in with today's virtualisation and RAID technology, certainly not my home NAS. I bought a single Hitachi DeskStar 7K4000 4TB drive as a general dumping ground for huge disk images and backup drive, which I placed in a MacAlly G-S350SUAB USB2/Firewire 800/400/eSata case, very stylish! I had to buy this new external case as none of my others were able to address anything over 2TB (poor show, hardware manufacturers!), a pitfall I fell into hook line and sinker, and it's surprising just how few high quality cases there are which have Firewire 800 AND support for 4TB+ hard drives.