X-RAID upgrading from 2 drives to 4

Still negligible performance increase and 3rd party memory not supported.

If want faster performance you need a x86 NAS (e.g. Ultra, Pro)

I would try to get 2tb drives if at all possible, since the nv+ is limited to 2tb max, you won't have to worry about upgrading drives again.

Cool. I guess that's settled. I'll order two 2TB drives now, and another two in a few month's time. I'll have an upgrade path of the Ultra or Pro at some point in the future too if I need the performance (been quite happy with the NV+ all these years though!)

Of course do note that you can't migrate disks from a Sparc NAS (e.g. NV+) to an x86 NAS (e.g. Ultra or Pro), but by the time you come to such an upgrade hopefully you'll be ready to move to 3TB drives.

By "migrate" you just mean that I can't simply move them from one device to another and expect all my shares to be intact, right? There's nothing physically changed on the disks that prevents me from just wiping them and starting afresh with 4 clean 2TB drives in a new ReadyNAS Ultra or Pro, right?

I guess if I'm ready to upgrade to 3TB disks then I may as well just leave the NV+ as it is and buy myself a new Ultra (or whatever) and a new set of disks to go with it!

Yes you could wipe the disks if you want (you would of course need somewhere to backup your data to and backup your data first). I guess it does depend when you want to migrate to a new NAS as to what you'll do.

Personally when you come to migrate (maybe in a few years or so) I'd leave the 2TB disks in the NV+ and use it as a backup NAS for important data on the new NAS with higher capacity disks.

Right, resurrecting this thread because the floods in Thailand put the kibosh on my plan to split my purchase of hard drives between batches.

I went ahead and bought two Samsung F4 2TB drives at the end of last year, with the aim of buying another couple in a few months' time to reduce the likelihood of a bad batch affecting all four of my units. Unfortunately not only did HDD prices skyrocket shortly after, but Samsung has ceased production of this model (did they get re-branded by Seagate for a while? I lost track of that story).

So my question is this: Can anybody suggest good alternatives to pair with my two F4s? I paid something in the region of £50 each last year - I imagine I'm not going to get that level of bang per buck this year. The options available to me will help me decide whether to wait a bit longer for prices to stabilise, or to take the hit and buy some more expensive units in order to get up and running again.

Suggestions welcome!

Well I would have suggested the WD Red but they're not on the compatibility list: http://support.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20686/

Thanks for the reply. I've managed to stick with the compatibility list so far so unless there's a very good reason, I'd like to continue doing so. Do the WD Red drives constitute such a good reason?

I could go through the CL and check the price of every 2TB drive to see if it falls within my budget, but I'm more interested if anybody has opinions on what drives would be a good pairing with my two existing-but-as-yet-unused Samsung F4s. I know these were at the budget end of the market when I bought them, but was happy to go with them because my NV+ wasn't a high performance unit anyway. I'm loathe to spend too much if I won't benefit from them being significantly better than the Samsungs - money would be better spent on a new NAS with a whole set of new drives! :)

I'd go with a Hitachi drive. I wouldn't go with a Red drive till they're qualified.