Readynas Ultra 2 - 4TB drive recomendations ?

One of the NAS drives (e.g. WD RED) should be fine but if it's not on the compatibility list make sure your backups are up to date as If something goes wrong you will likely be denied support.

mdgm wrote:
One of the NAS drives (e.g. WD RED) should be fine but if it's not on the compatibility list make sure your backups are up to date as If something goes wrong you will likely be denied support.

thanks, but i really need a "guaranteed-to-work" drive before shelling out over £200 for 2 x 4TB drives. Do you have an exact model of 4TB WD RED that works ?

many thanks

There is no WDC Red 4 TB model. WD4000F9YZ was probably the drive mdgm had in mind. It is brand new, and I haven't seen any posts from folks who are using it yet. Seagate ST4000VN000 is a somewhat cheaper alternative, there are some posts on it if you search the forum.

Both are recommended by their manufacturer for NAS use. Neither on the the ultra-2 HCL, so Netgear will likely deny support if you use them. Though the HCL is out-of-date, it is possible that they will add them both.

BTW, Hitachi was acquired by Western Digital in March 2012. These drives are now branded "HGST" (www.hgst.com)

StephenB wrote:

There is no WDC Red 4 TB model. WD4000F9YZ was probably the drive mdgm had in mind. It is brand new, and I haven't seen any posts from folks who are using it yet. Seagate ST4000VN000 is a somewhat cheaper alternative, there are some posts on it if you search the forum. Both are recommended by their manufacturer for NAS use. Neither on the the ultra-2 HCL, so Netgear will likely deny support if you use them. Though the HCL is out-of-date, it is possible that they will add them both. BTW, Hitachi was acquired by Western Digital in March 2012. These drives are now branded "HGST" (http://www.hgst.com)

toob your advice and went for a pair of Seagate ST4000VN000's

pixmania cheapest £301 delivered (used coupon code to claim £7 back)

cheers

About drives I choosed the 3TB from Toshiba 5000rpm (the DT01ABA300). They are a perfect and cheap alternative to the series of hdd specialised for NASes that Seagate and WD are doing (the Red). Why ? Because these toshiba do have SMART Command Transport Error Recovery Control (SCT ERC) which prevent the disk to be ejected from the Array by the NAS os if they took too much time to answer to read/write on bad blocks. With SCT ERC you can activate it and choose for example 7 sec for the maxim time to answer (it's the time the 'Red' do have and this setting doesn't exists in Green of seagate normal drive : it's artificial segmentation of the market by the brands based on firmwares.
(translate this from french into your own language : http://www.hardware.fr/articles/888-2/6 ... estes.html )
I had each 3TB drive for 93€ which is 122$ (the price convince me to not wait for the 4TB Red drives...). Sure there isn't the special service to send a Red hdd before sending your defective drive and the warranty is only 2 years compare to 3 for both seagate and WD.

It was just my 2 cents of advice for cheap buyers :)

update : still not a single problem with my Toshiba 5900rpm drives. But I am really waiting an implementation of a spin down in OS 6.1.x. I know it takes some time to test this functionality with so many drives bu in my opinion it's really not an option but should have been included in the first updates. This OS was released 6 month ago and I hope to not wait for 2 years for this, or may drives would be "burned" after so long :D