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Forum Discussion
Upgrading an old ReadyNAS 3200
Greetings all, I have a situation. I have a 4 year old 24TB Readynas 3200 that is still super functional. Unfortunately, when I purcased, I only bought one extra WD 2TB Drive (WD2003FYYS) I...
The 3200 is a very slightly customized version of a Supermicro server running the Netgear software. Pretty much any enterprise grade drive should work on it (up to the limitations of the ports, which is 2TB on all but the first 4). With a 12-bay chassis, I would not suggest desktop or even NAS purposed drives. The ability to use advanced format drives does depend on at what OS version the last factory default was performed. I don't recall the critical version, but I'm sure one of the moderators will chime in.
Your 3200 can run OS6.x, too, if you so choose. It requires a factory default and won't lift the hardware limitation on drive sizes.
One thing I have wondered is if you can disable the RAID controller in the motherboard via the BIOS and install an LSI 9211-8i card, as is built into the 4200V2 and have the OS recognize it. That would get you past the 2TB limitation. You'd need the right cables, too, but it would be a lot cheaper than upgrading the whole machine (though no increase in speed).
So long as you're running 4.2.12 (or later) you could replace the disks (one at a time) and get 4k sector partition alignment.
mdgm wrote:So long as you're running 4.2.12 (or later) you could replace the disks (one at a time) and get 4k sector partition alignment.
Thank you! I am running the latest 4.2.30 - so I should be good to add a modern 2TB drive, then, correct? Any suggestions?
I was looking at WD site, specifically their gold datacenter drive series (as Red's look to be 5400 RPM)
WD2005FBYZ 2TB SATA 6Gb s 7200 128MB https://www.wdc.com/products/business-internal-storage/wd-gold.html#WD2005FBYZ
It will give you 4k sector partition alignment for the disk that is added. If a disk was added before 4.2.12 then it would not be 4k sector partition aligned unless after updating to 4.2.12 you removed it, then added it back again and waited for the resync to complete before moving onto the next disk.
mdgm wrote:It will give you 4k sector partition alignment for the disk that is added. If a disk was added before 4.2.12 then it would not be 4k sector partition aligned unless after updating to 4.2.12 you removed it, then added it back again and waited for the resync to complete before moving onto the next disk.
Ok, I understand. All 12 of the 2TB WD are original dating back to 2013 so I am sure that the existing drives would not be 4k partition aligned.
I really had no plans of upgrading the existing 12 drives - only to buy 1-2 more drives for swapping in case of any of the existing original drives failing (as I only have one, I am in a bad position right now). So for the immediacy, I need to have a couple of 2TB drives available for replacing any failed drive(s).
So my quesion would be this, based on what you have said -- would I be safe to purchase the most recent 2TB WD Gold model to use as a replacement should a drive fail? (Oh and just so you know, I actually have two volumes with 6 drives each - so two 12TB volumes each with Raid 5. My plans would be, since I am re-provisionning some of my equipment locally, to keep Volume C, delete volume D and expand Volume C to the full 24TB, though I realize Raid 5 isn't probably the best solution for a 12 drive NAS)
Thank you so much!
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