ReadyNAS Device Compatibility List

gosand wrote:

Only after speccing out and purchasing all of this, and wasting days and days while blowing multiple disks in this setup, did it ever even occur to me that there could be such a thing as an HCL for hard drives. That's NOT obvious, and there is no reason for the average person to understand the nuances of modern day hard disk firmwares and greenwashing and all of the other BS that causes a simple SATA device to behave badly like this.

I agree. NetGear should make it clearer e.g. get resellers to point out in the information that they provide to customers that you need to use drives on the HCL found at http://www.readynas.com/hcl. Your kind of situation is part of the reason for NetGear distributing NASes prepopulated with drives.

gosand wrote:
Oh I've learned my lesson now - I will never be a WD/seagate/hitachi beta tester again, but it's not like I willfully ignored the HCL or just crossed my fingers or something - I had NO IDEA that modern drives were this ridiculously complicated and so fraught with bad code. Shame on them.

Part of the problem is that if one manufacturer releases a higher capacity drive the others won't want to be left behind...

gosand wrote:
Oh, hey - there's that $2500+ paperweight again.

It's not a paperweight. It may be to you at the moment but the NAS should work with drives from the HCL. And you have a five year warranty starting from when you purchased earlier this year.

gosand wrote:
mdgm wrote: These things take time to get sorted out. They've been in the channel for purchase for 10 months now. I pity the poor people who _didn't_ blow a few drives right off the bat and are now nursing broken systems along, or worse, have lost data. At least my paperweight had no data on it yet...

Well NetGear has to work with WD, try and get information, code etc. from WD, compile etc. and then test it. If the tests fail, then they would have to continue to work with WD and come up with a new solution and try that. It takes time to rigorously test drives. Then the people at NetGear could have a whole range of other issues that could crop up that they have to deal with. I don't find it too hard to imagine how these things can drag on quite a long time. It's annoying for you, but there's not much that can be done about it except to wait, I think.