I have the ReadyNAS Ultra 4, have been running 2x2TB for 3 years, and I recently threw in a 4TB drive in slot 3 (HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724040ALE640). It recognized fine and did the expansion, however I'm showing 3 X 2TB (3 X 1863), not 2 X 2 and 1 X 4. Should I have not used a 4TB drive to expand? This one is on the supported list. Is that 2TB unusable?RAIDiator 4.2.26

You need a second 4TB disk installed to be able to use additional space. X-RAID2 volumes can only be expanded when redundant space can be added.Please also note a couple of expansion limits:1. You cannot expand by more than 8TB over the life of the volume. If the volume capacity was 1.8TB when you last did a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) you cannot expand past 9.8TB2. You cannot expand past 16TB. To have a volume capacity >16TB you would need to do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) with the drives in place.

Thanks for the help. So, I'm not sure if your (1.) means I can or cannot add another 4TB in slot 4. That would bring me to 12TB total. When I bought the unit, it was built with 2x2TB and I haven't done a factory default since.It sounds like I could add 4TB, then swap out the 2 2TB drives and replace them with 2 4TB drives? I'd rather just add another 4TB drive if that's doable.

Adding the second 4TB drive to the empty slot you would not hit the 8TB limit. Your volume would expand by around 3.7TB. 1.8TB (from adding first 4TB disk) + 3.7TB (after adding second) < 8TB, however when you need even more space then a backup and factory reset will become necessary.

The key idea here is that the 8 TiB limit applies to the volume size, not the raw disk sizes. You will end up with an ~8TB volume, so you can't exceed the 8 TiB growth limit no matter where you started from.Assuming you actually did start with 2 x 2TB, you are growing ~6TB in this step. So you could replace one of the 2 TB drives with a 4 TB model in the future, but that is as far as you can take it.Disk manufacturers use power-of-10 units (1 000 000 000 000 bytes = 1 TB). Windows and many other software platforms (including the ultra) use power-of-2 units (1 099 511 627 776 bytes = 1 TiB). mdgm is using TiB in his post, which is why the numbers might be a bit smaller than you expect.

Hi StephenB,Would you please be more specific where 8TiB limit is coming from ? according to http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/24555 4.2.26 should support 16TiB (and more after factory reset)I'm considering to expand the space on my ultra 4 NAS with 4x 4tb WD red in raid5. I know that the drives are not in the compatibility list but I'm going to give it a try. In the same time I don't want to run into any limitation on the SW side. ThanksStephenB wrote:The key idea here is that the 8 TiB limit applies to the volume size, not the raw disk sizes. You will end up with an ~8TB volume, so you can't exceed the 8 TiB growth limit no matter where you started from.Assuming you actually did start with 2 x 2TB, you are growing ~6TB in this step. So you could replace one of the 2 TB drives with a 4 TB model in the future, but that is as far as you can take it.Disk manufacturers use power-of-10 units (1 000 000 000 000 bytes = 1 TB). Windows and many other software platforms (including the ultra) use power-of-2 units (1 099 511 627 776 bytes = 1 TiB). mdgm is using TiB in his post, which is why the numbers might be a bit smaller than you expect.

ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4TB | NETGEAR Communities

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StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

Oct 06, 2014

crond wrote:
StephenB wrote:
crond - 4x4TB would give you a 12 TB volume (10.9 TiB). So if your initial volume size (last default or initial install) was less than 2.9 TiB, then you would hit the 8 TiB growth limit..

my initial install was 4x2tb in raid5 -> 6tb total. I'm happy with raid but it's been up and running for over 3 years nonstop and Load/unload cycles on disks are over 1.2M or 400% of what WD recommends and warranty ended this month, so time to change them before they fail. I'm thinking about going with 4tb which should give me 12tb, so theoretically I should be able to replace disks and grow volume. I guess it will take me a week+ to replace disks one by one / rebuild raid5 / grow volume.
Do you know any side effects or caveats that I should be aware of ?

Thanks!

I have 4 old green drives that are in my NV+, which have lots of load cycles also. That's just for backup, so I haven't worried about it.

You should be able to execute this plan, though of course backups are always advisable when manipulating disks. If you do make a full backup, you could do a clean factory install with all 4 new drives in place. It could turn out to be faster than 4 hot-inserts and resyncs.

vandermerwe - wdc's position - at least for a while- was that using wdidle3 would void your warranty. Though I never heard of them enforcing it.

ThurstonX
Aspirant
Dec 01, 2014
Given that the Ultra 4 is a legacy product now, is there any hope of more 4 TB HDDs being added to the compatibility list? There's only one on there now (Hitachi). I'm looking at the Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB, which is on sale now. I have 4x 3 TB Hitachi Deskstars in my Ultra 4, and after the latest RAIDiator update I got a reallocated sector. Count hasn't increased in the past week, but I'm thinking about expanding to 4 TB drives. I might be willing to take a chance on these Seagate drives, esp. if someone with knowledge and experience thinks they should work.

TIA.

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ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4TB

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