ReadyNAS Value Added Resellers

No 4TB drives have been approved for use in a ReadyNAS yet. I agree that eAegis was a good source. I never bought from them, as I found out about them after I got my two NVX units. However, they may have had a run in with Netgear because they were installing drives in a diskless unit and listing it with the same model number that Netgear used for the models that came from the factory with disks. Since they were using consumer grade disks usually, their prices were far below the Netgear list with enterprise disks. In fact, when I was looking at a unit, I could buy the NAS with consumer disks installed and tested for less than I could buy a diskless unit and disks anywhere, including from them! However, because the price of disks has gotten so crazy, Netgear is now populating the Pro 6 with consumer grade disks and putting a D at the end of the model number. RNDP6630-200 for example has enterprise disks and the RNDP6630D-200 has consumer grade disks, but still at a hefty price.

The only other solution I would have for you is to find a retail online seller that will ship to you where you are. (Not easy I know) Backing up almost 12TB of data is not going to be an easy chore. I went to NAS to NAS backups when I got close to 1TB of data (currently at 2.5).

By the way, do you have a Pro 6 or a Pro (original 6 bay unit). The difference is the Pro was model RNDP6xxx-100xxx and the Pro 6 is model RNDP6xxx-200xxx. The major difference is the CPU chip in the Pro was an Intel E2160 1.8GHz dual core (now in the Ultra 6 Plus) and the Pro 6 now has the faster Intel E5300 2.6Ghz dual core. The only way I know of to tell them apart is to check the label on the bottom and the upper right corner of a Frontview page would say Pro vs Pro 6. The change in models came in the fall of 2010.

The other thing that I would say is that if you are approaching 12TB of data and have no backup, you have your neck stuck way out there.

PapaBear,

I'm fully aware there are no 4tb drives on the HCL, believe me that isn't going to stop me. As long as one other person says they have some working, I'll stuff some in there. I have the Pro 6 (according to Frontview) populated from eAegis with 6 Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 consumer-class 3tb drives for which I paid around $2300 pre-floods. I have 3 tiers of data, with tier 1 backed up in about 10 different spots, and tier 2 backed up on an old ReadyNAS NV with 6tb (about 6 years old) at the house in Thailand, as well as on portable drives. Some tier 3 data is also backed up on a myriad of portable 1.5tb drives, but none of the data is what you would consider "valuable" so my neck isn't really out there. I have about 50 users sharing data on the NAS, and the reason I'm looking for a VAR for a new NAS and not backing up to LTO or something is so I can use the current one as a full backup and just set the boxes in a corner and just forget about them. I also have no time or energy to roll my own custom solution, although I have looked into building a 24-odd disk setup and groaned at the thought of RMA'ing that many disks.

Paying a $1000 premium to buy another of what I have right now doesn't make sense to me. I hate the idea of switching to QNAP or Thecus because Netgear (may have) shut down the VARs, but if nobody knows of anyone out there who will do it, I guess that is what I may have to do. I have to admit, it doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy towards the ReadyNAS brand knowing that yoh-dah and chirpa have left.

Anybody else know any VARs?

Here is a discussion about 4TB drives in a discussion in the Community Hardware Compatibility List area. In order to go this route you would generally have to roll your own by purchasing a diskless unit and populating it yourself. The only 4TB drive I find in the retail chain is the HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies the spinoff from Hitachi that is now part of Western Digital) and the US price on Newegg is $530 each. That means that it would cost you about $3200 for the drives and another $1000 for the bare chassis. If you with with 3TB enterprise disks, the Seagate ST33000650NS are $400 each which would cost you $2400 for the drives. There are currently no consumer grade approved drives on the HCL, although the Seagate ST3000DM003 which sells for $170 each is approved for the NVX (x-86 based but unlike the Pro6 is 32bit not 64bit) and the NV+ v2 (the new ARM based unit). They will probably work in the x-86 64bit units as well.

Here is a discussion about the ST3000DM003 in the Ultra6 and Pro6. To put things in prospective, you can purchase two Pro6 diskless units and populate both 6xST3000DM001 drives for about what you would pay for one Pro6 with 4TB Hitachi drives. You could also purchase spare drives to act as spares in case you have a drive problem. When I bought 8x1TB Seagates when I populated my two NVX units, I actually bought 10 so I would have two spares. I have used both and have actually used two replacement drives received from Seagate. Various models do have different experiences.

With the total revamping of Seagates line, the purchase of Samsung hard drive by Seagate and the purchase of Hitachi hard drives by WD has really shaken up the market with many of the drives that had been on the market not EOL's and the new drives needing to be tested.

There are still VAR's as a few have posted on the forums about setting up units for clients. Technically I don't know that eAegis was really a VAR as they seemed more of a full service retailer. They would sell you a unit with the drives installed and burned in for 72 hours, but did no real customized set ups that I recall. And of course they would not bring the unit to your office and set it up. Of course I remember the days when a retailer would set up a computer and burn it in for 24-48 hours before returning it to the box and shipping it to you. Those days seem to be gone.

If you go with a competitor, be sure to ensure that it supports NFS and rsync. I have two NVX units, and my NVX Pioneer backs up my NVX Pro every night starting at midnight. It does this via 4 backup routines via rsync and each job takes only minutes at most. The first backup will need to be done via NFS and then the routine shifted to rsync after the initial backup. Rsync synchronizes the files between two NAS units file by file. The first backup if done by rsync is dog slow because of the synchronization routine which is why it is better to use NFS. NFS just copies everything in a share to the designated share on the backup unit. Note that rsync is not an incremental backup where you have to do a full backup every week or so, but only copies over the changed portion of a file. When the jobs are done the files are identical on both units.

PapaBear wrote:

There are still VAR's as a few have posted on the forums about setting up units for clients. Technically I don't know that eAegis was really a VAR as they seemed more of a full service retailer. They would sell you a unit with the drives installed and burned in for 72 hours, but did no real customized set ups that I recall. And of course they would not bring the unit to your office and set it up. Of course I remember the days when a retailer would set up a computer and burn it in for 24-48 hours before returning it to the box and shipping it to you. Those days seem to be gone.

NCIX (in Canada) still does this. They're great to their customers.


Although not approved, if you can find Hitachi consumer grade 4TB drives, they will probably work fine in your NAS. According to the guys at BackBlaze, Hitachi's consumer drives have been the least problematic when it comes to things like TLER/CCTL timeouts, and generally work the best with consumer RAID cards. They have the lowest number of array dropouts, and within the first 1.5 years of use for thousands of drives they have had under a 1% failure rate. That's impressive.
http://ncix.ca/products/?sku=67570

I had seen these as low as $240 on Newegg, but they are now sold out.

The only thing I can't speak to is how ready NetGear's NAS's are for > 16TB volumes. I recall hearing there were some expansion issues beyond 16TB in size, which could be an issue with a 6x4TB setup?

Expansion to 6x4TB could be a problem, but a factory reset should work. Of course you'd need to restore a lot of data from backup.

If you are going to go with 6x4TB drives, start with one and then add them one at a time to make sure each one is individually accepted. Then once the last drive has been resynched, perform a factory default before you copy over any data and before you customize the configuration. Then once the resync has been done you would be beyond the 16TB limit (if single redundancy, if dual redundancy you would still be just under the 16TB limit with a net volume of about 14.4TB).

PapaBear wrote:

If you are going to go with 6x4TB drives, start with one and then add them one at a time to make sure each one is individually accepted. Then once the last drive has been resynched, perform a factory default before you copy over any data and before you customize the configuration. Then once the resync has been done you would be beyond the 16TB limit (if single redundancy, if dual redundancy you would still be just under the 16TB limit with a net volume of about 14.4TB).

Good advice. :)

Ah ha! $229.99 for 4TB. Probably the best deal available right now on tons of capacity.
http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku= ... omoid=1382