ReadyNAS Value Added Resellers

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.