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Forum Discussion
Maximum Storage by Disk and Total Unit Capacity
Hi,
I am a proud owner of a RNDU4000 (ReadyNAS Ultra 4 [X-RAID2]) that I've been using, going on 10 years now. I'm currently running RAIDar Utility Version 6.4.0 and Firmware/RAIDiator 4.2.31 with three disks (two 3TB and one 2TB) and 1024 MB of DDR2 RAM. I am wanting to upgrade each drive to 4TB (or possibly 6TB) but given this NAS's age, I don't know if it would support it. Can someone help?
Many Thanks in Advance!
DJOROD
6 Replies
There are two expansion limits in the 4.2 firmware
- a volume can't expand over 16 TiB
- a volume can't expand more than 8 TiB from it's initial size.
So in the case of a 4-bay ultra, the first limit means that you can expand to 4x4 TB (12 TB volume) or even 4x5TB (15 TB volume). 4x6TB exceeds the 16 TiB ceiling, but 3x6TB+4TB would work.
The second limit might also apply, and if it does you'll need to do a factory reset with all disks in place.
You can convert your NAS to run OS 6 - which doesn't have these expansion limits. That process isn't supported by Netgear, but many have done it. It does require a factory reset, but you are facing that possibility already. In addition to eliminating the expansion limits, you'd also get new features - including support for SMB 3.0, which is helpful since Microsoft is deprecating the SMB 1.0 protocol that your ultra uses.
Hi Stephanie,
Thanks for your prompt reply on this. Converting my NAS to run OS 6 sounds very enticing but I fear that in doing so, this procedure could also "brick" the appliance. Would I be at risk of this?
DJOROD wrote:
Converting my NAS to run OS 6 sounds very enticing but I fear that in doing so, this procedure could also "brick" the appliance. Would I be at risk of this?
I haven't seen any posts from Ultra owners reporting a bricked NAS when doing the conversion. There are a couple of OS 4.2.x NAS models that use 32 bit processors, and they can be bricked - but the Ultra is a 64 bit platform.
There are also a couple of folks who found that the upgrade resulted in the NAS no longer knowing it's serial number. That creates issues connecting to ReadyCloud. Netgear mods here (for example JohnCM_S ) have solved that problem for a couple of folks.
As I said, it is not supported by Netgear - and you won't be able to get paid Netgear support if you switch. But overall, people doing this conversion have reported success.
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