New WD Red 4TB Drives

The WD RED 4TB drives will probably work but if you encounter issues using drives outside the compatibility list you will probably be denied support.

Also be aware that you cannot expand your volume by more than 8TB over its life. So if your volume capacity was 1.8TB when you last factory default you cannot expand past 9.8TB.

So depending what disks were installed when you last did a factory reset you may need to backup your data and do a factory reset.

Thank you for the reply. I was looking at the spec sheet for my unit and max capacity is 12TB, so looks like 4TB drives are pointless, my as well go with the four 3TB drive set up.

Might look into adding a second unit too.

Thanks again.

Spec sheets are produced based on currently available drives and what has been qualified at the time they are written.

Users have tried 4TB disks in models such as yours and found them to work. Any ReadyNAS model that supports 3TB drives should also work with 4TB drives.

Interesting. So I could go with four 4TB and be at 16TB? If so that would be great!

You could go with 4TB drives but be aware of the support issues and that depending on what disks were in the NAS when you last did a factory default you may hit an expansion limit (see above) in which case you should backup your data and do a factory default then restore your data from backup.

mdgm wrote:
You could go with 4TB drives but be aware of the support issues and that depending on what disks were in the NAS when you last did a factory default you may hit an expansion limit (see above) in which case you should backup your data and do a factory default then restore your data from backup.

Yeah I've been reading about this expansion limit. If I remember correctly, I when I bought it in 2011, I put in 4 2TB. So I'm thinking i should be ok going to 16. If not, I'll just go through the several days of backing up all my movies (about 3 TB worth), plus documents, pictures, computer back up images....will take a long time!

If you started with 4x2TB drives you wouldn't hit the expansion limit going to 4x4TB drives.

Jcon,

I'm in the same spot as you, I also have 4x2TB but WD Green. I have ordered 4x4TB WD Red for my Ultra 4 +. I'm not sure I want to factory reset or not, I think I'll do the expand first. I have everything backed up, would there be any benefit doing a factory default at this point?

Provided you had 4x2TB installed when you last factory default not say one or two 2TB disks installed you should be fine.

Do be prepared though that the process will take quite a while of replacing one disk at a time, wait for resync to complete, replace next disk etc.

blumman wrote:
would there be any benefit doing a factory default at this point?

mdgm wrote:
Do be prepared though that the process will take quite a while of replacing one disk at a time, wait for resync to complete, replace next disk etc.

A default and restore from backup is likely faster than 4 resyncs and expansions. Though of course the data is always accessible if you do the disks one at a time.