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Forum Discussion
ReadyNas Duo V2 disk change
Hi. - I have 1GB WD green installed in my readynas duo v2 and everything has been working well. As the disks are nearing capacity, I bought 2 WD EFRX 3TB disk (I checked and it is compatible with the ...
What firmware is your NAS running? Many v1 owners mistakenly think they have a v2 - the labeling is confusing. This matters because the v1s are limited to 2 TB drives.
Duos running 4.1.x firmware are v1 models (not v2). Duos running 5.3.x systems are v2s.
If you are in fact running 5.3.x, The next step is to test the disk - best done by connecting it to a Windows PC with SATA or a USB adapter/dock. Then test it with WD's Lifeguard program.
You could remove the new disk, and hot-insert the other one, and see if it comes up normally.
If you do need to exchange the new disks, I suggest making sure you get the EFRX model, and not the newer EFAX. The EFAX is an SMR disk - it might be ok, but there are some drawbacks to SMR. You could also go with the corresponding Seagate Ironwolf models. Note the NAS HCL hasn't been updated in a long time, so it's not as useful as it once was.
Hi Stephen - yes my firmware is 4.1 something but when I looked at the back of my readynas, the label did say v2.
I did what I said to Marc before and now the capacity is showing only 700GB. I tried to insert the old drive back and now doing initialization. will wait until it is finished.
I did what I said to Marc before and now the capacity is showing only 700GB. I tried to insert the old drive back and now doing initialization. will wait until it is finished.
Micesam wrote:
Hi Stephen - yes my firmware is 4.1 something but when I looked at the back of my readynas, the label did say v2.
I did what I said to Marc before and now the capacity is showing only 700GB. I tried to insert the old drive back and now doing initialization. will wait until it is finished.As I said, the labeling is confusing. You certainly have a v1. The 700 GB size is because the NAS can't handle disks over 2 TB. It doesn't use GPT formatting, and the math it uses for sizes overflows with larger disks. So 700 GB is all you'll get if you stick with your 3 TB drives.
If I were in your shoes I'd exchange the disks for WD20EFRX (not EFAX) or 2 TB Ironwolf drives.
To be more complete:
A Duo v1
- says "Duo" on the front panel
- runs 4.1.x firmware
- often has a label that says v2 or even v3 on the back
A Duo v2
- says "Duo v2" on the front panel
- runs 5.3.x firmware
- often has a part number label with -200XXX on the back.
- Hi stephen - I finally got a replacement but unknowingly got given the EFAX version. Will this be bad or I need to ask for an exchange again? I looked at the HCL and the EFAX is nowhere there, so I am worried if I open it - I will end up not able to exchange them. I am already installing the 3TB version on my PC as data disk - so dont want another 2TB there.
Micesam wrote:
I looked at the HCLThe HCL hasn't been updated for many years now, so unfortunately it has become largely useless as a guide.
Micesam wrote:
I finally got a replacement but unknowingly got given the EFAX version. Will this be bad or I need to ask for an exchange again?This isn't as easy a question as it might sound. The EFAX (in 2 TB to 6 TB sizes) uses a disk technology called SMR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording
Write performance in these drives can very variable - because when you update a data block, tracks after that also need to be re-written until the end of the SMR zone. The drive has a fairly large cache, and schedules this re-writing in the background as best it can. However, there can still be times when the drive basically has to pause accepting new write requests until it catches up.
As far as Western Digital is concerned, the EFAX should work in your NAS. And if you aren't doing a lot of file updates, you might not run into the performance issues above (at least not very often). So one option is to simply try it, and then do a replacement later on if you run into problems with it.
That said, I'm not planning to use the SMR EFAX drives myself. If you want to do another exchange, you could specify the older EFRX model, or switch to the Seagate Ironwolf (which doesn't use SMR technology).
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