ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 drive upgrade

Thanks for the replies guys. TBH I think I may have left drive upgrade a bit late as it seems suitable drives with RVS are becoming in short supply due to evolution I suppose. Having said that I somewhat feel that kit manufacture has come along and regular drives are likely to be quite reliable if a decent brand is picked. It's not as if the location of my NAS is one where it is getting knocked about either. Though I understand some of the RVS thing relates to drive<>drive vibration in the chassis too.

Coincidentally the Barracudas mentioned by ilneill had drawn my eye previously, nice cache, xfer rate and nice price to boot. However some of the reviews are a bit scary, and that's even after excluding the ones that are being used as external HDDs rather than sat in a NAS box. The customer feedback seems to be polarised and when bad, it seems very bad, right down to the packaging. I even wonder if some are sneaky recons. I used to buy hundreds of HDDs when I did a lot of storage management and even in that environment the failure rate was very low, but perhaps my route of purchase was more direct to elude any potential dodgy goings on.

How long have you been running these and have any errors shown?

As I've not swapped out any of mine before I was interested to read that you can just swap 1 for the bigger unit, let it sort itself, then finalise the mirror by banging the 2nd bigger one in. For some reason I was under the impression that with the Duo, you ditched both drives, set up a new pair, then restored data to the mirror set. In terms of emergency rollback I would of course have my original pair of 1TB units

As for the WD WD20EFRX mentioned by StephenB, I'd not seen that as I'd been focusing on the Netgear HCL and that model is not included. However the feedback seems consistently better and I do like the angle WD play saying they will work in whatever NAS you use. Bold, and I've not had any issues with WD kit in the past either. Interestingly I see a Q and someone has replied saying they have them in their Duo.

Hmm right now I think I can see where this is going...subject to a bit more reading on the WD Red to see if specific compatibility with Duo is mentioned, maybe even up to 3TB

Cheers again guys, as ever this is a helpful and knowledgeable place to discuss issues.
As and when I make a decision I'll be sure to share results. :-)

Quick update which may benefit others going down same route.

WD Reds arrived last night. Out of habit I left them to one side for a couple of hours to come up to room temp. Well, I went to the pub :-)

Started the process on return, on bay2, and let things run. Got up this morning to see first stage had completed a couple of hours previously. Replaced bay1, wait some more. Got prompts for each stage finalising in a couple of reboots leading to completed expansion. Total elapsed just short of 24hrs given the 1TB set was just over 80% full. So far looking ok :-)