Which drives to buy?

I just noticed that the Hitachi HDS723020ALA642 (P/N 0F12115) is now on the list. If you are in the U.S., Newegg has them for $120 with free shipping. However, you might want to consider the Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630 (P/N 0S03230) which are 3TB and Newegg currently has them for $130 with free shipping. I have four of these in service and have had no problems with them in the over two months they have been in service. Now these are "Green Drives" as they are only 5400 RPM. However, they may be a tad slower than the 7200 RPM drives, but in the vast amount of operations you won't notice a difference. I have two each in an NVX with two Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB drives that are over a year old and are 7200 RPM drives and have not had any issues with synchronization of the drives with two different speeds.

An extra 1TB for only $10 is a fairly good bargain. You could install 3 in the Ultra 4 and have a larger volume than with 4 of the 2TB drives. (I would buy 4 to have a spare on hand, which is always nice, even if you don't use it for a long time).

Both the Hitachi and Samsung drives have good reputations. I have hear very few problems with any of the above Hitachi drives or the Samsung HD204UI other than the fact that it is not on all the HCLs. For example while it is on the list for your Ultra 4, it is not on the list for the Ultra 4 Plus nor the Pro 4, and not for my older NVX either.

When looking up Hitachi, they are sometimes listed by the online retailers by the P/N rather than the Drive Model. For example my HDS5C3030ALA630 drives are available as either bare OEM drives (but are in shock mounts in a small brown box) as P/N 0S03230 or as Retail packaging with white box with pictures and selling points, and a booklet inside the box as well as the shock mounted drive. (It may or may not have an SATA cable) This package is listed as P/N 0S3228 and costs $15 more ($145) but is the same drive. (Newegg has posted photos of the drive labels).

Hitachi's OEM drive packaging is the best I have seen. It is a plain brown box with molded styrene drive supports that keep the drive from hitting the sides or ends of the box in transit. Most OEM drives are just the bare drive itself leaving it up to the vendor to protect the drive in transit. Newegg used to do a very good job wrapping each drive in bubble wrap, but now the just wrap them in crumpled paper inside a small box which is then placed inside a larger box with more crumpled paper.

I have never heard of the Samsung Eco Green drives automatically failing after 6 months. I have a 2 year old HD203WI, but it has not been in constant service, serving as a backup drive. But keep in mind that any hard drive can fail at any time. This is why RAID is used. I have lost drives at 30 days several times, and have recently lost several drives at slightly over one year. Many of these can be attributed to rough handling, especially if you buy a block of drives and they start giving problems at the same point. I simply don't accept that any drive manufacturer would survive if their drives were known to all fail at a certain life. I have one Seagate drive that is now over 10 years old (8GB) and still runs. (Not in RAID service).

TX PapaBear

You're talking about the Samsung HD204UI .
Is this then an eco green disk?

I also have a look into the Hitachi ones.
The Seagate referring my post has a speed of 6Gb/s. Wondering if the Ultra can handele this on his Sata 2 interface?

Thanks so far.

SATA is backwards compatible. SATA III (6Gb/s) disks work fine even with the oldest of ReadyNAS which have SATA I (1.5Gb/s). I believe the Ultra has SATA II. If a disk is on the compatibility list (http://www.readynas.com/hcl), then it's compatible, having passed NetGear's extensive testing to determine suitability for use in the ReadyNAS. Of course not all disks are equal and some disks are better than others.

deejay - yes, Samsung calles them LP drives, but the industry calls any LP (low powered) drives "green" or "eco green" drives since they rotate a little slower, they use less power. For us, one of the benefits is that in many cases they are also slightly less expensive. Of course one has to recognize that even the original SATA 1.5Gb/s drives have the ability to fully saturate a home 1Gb/s network. So the 3Gb/s and now the 6Gb/s interfaces may be nice internally on a PC able to use the speed, but don't do a thing across the network.

The predecessor of the HD204UI, the HD203WI was also a low powered drive and had a good reputation.

Thanks for responding folks.
I'll see what I can get for a good price.

To my mind, when it comes to upgrading HDs, there has to be some specific advice regarding the 4K-sector units. Are they compatible with sparc-based devices running the latest firmware but initialized with 512-byte blocks, in the 3.x Raidar era?

Say, for example, my RN Pro with 6 1-Tb drives is running the latest 4.2.19 beta firmware, but its volume log lists "Block size = 4096" because it was set up a couple of years ago. before FrontView 4.x. Can I autoexpand with 2Tb drives in the usual manner (i.e. replacing one by one)? Do they have to be 512-byte sector models? If I install a 4K sector unit (other than Western Digital) will I have to perform a system reset?

Help, PapaBear!

TIA

Xen

xenophon wrote:
To my mind, when it comes to upgrading HDs, there has to be some specific advice regarding the 4K-sector units. Are they compatible with sparc-based devices running the latest firmware but initialized with 512-byte blocks, in the 3.x Raidar era?

Don't confuse sector alignment of partitions with the block size of the volume. They are two separate things.

Also RAIDar is a client you can run on your Mac/Linux/Windows computer. I think you mean RAIDiator.

4k sector disks may have poor write performance if you didn't last factory reset on RAIDiator 4.1.7 or later to get 4k sector alignment. Whether the partitions on your disks are aligned for 4k sectors can be checked in partition.log.

There is a separate expansion limitation. If you last factory reset on RAIDiator 3.x, then your volume cannot expand past 5TB. You can check if you are affected by this limitation by looking at the block size of the volume.

Have a read of Why you might want to factory reset a Sparc ReadyNAS

xenophon wrote:

Say, for example, my RN Pro with 6 1-Tb drives is running the latest 4.2.19 beta firmware, but its volume log lists "Block size = 4096" because it was set up a couple of years ago. before FrontView 4.x. Can I autoexpand with 2Tb drives in the usual manner (i.e. replacing one by one)? Do they have to be 512-byte sector models? If I install a 4K sector unit (other than Western Digital) will I have to perform a system reset?

This is completely different to what you were talking about above. x86 ReadyNAS such as the Pro have Intel CPUs, and have completely different hardware to the Sparc ReadyNAS which have Infrant Sparc CPUs. The RAIDiator firmware was rewritten for x86 ReadyNAS. x86 ReadyNAS have always used RAIDiator 4.2.x. The volume has the standard 4k block size, performance is fine and there is no expansion limitation.

On x86 ReadyNAS, you should upgrade to 4.2.12 or later. Afterwards by swapping out the disks one by one (wait for resync to complete before swapping next disk) you will get 4k sector alignment.

Have a read of Why you might want to factory reset a x86 ReadyNAS

Duh!

Thanks for clearing out the confusion on my part. Sorry if I sidetracked the thread. That was very helpful.

Xen