Ready for expansion (RN Pro Pioneer Edition)-Seeking Advice

With dual redundancy, you will need to upgrade all four of your disks to get more storage space. So small steps probably don't make much sense. For NAS drives (seagate NAS or WDC Red) 4x2TB would cost ~$400 US and gain you 2 TB of storage. 4x3TB would cost ~$550 but gain you 4 TB - twice as big an increase.

As far as drive choices, I suggest the WD30EFRX (3 TB drives). They aren't enterprise, but they are intended for NAS, and have 3 year warranties (much better than the 1 year that the desktop drives have). They are also the newest 3 TB drive on the HCL. I use them in my pro-6 and my RN102, and have had no issues with them at all.

If you go off the HCL, Netgear will likely deny support - and you do have about a year of warranty left.

There are two expansion limits
(a)you can't exceed 16 TiB total volume size. That wouldn't apply to you until someone makes > 8 TB drives.
(b) You can't grow a volume more than 8 TiB over its lifetime. If you started with this configuration, you could expand up to 4x5TB. So you have plenty of headroom.

Thanks StephenB.

I vaguely remembering when I first purchased (and I am looking at my my hand-written notes now, which are shabby at best) I can fill up current empty slots 5 and 6 to increase capacity and maintain dual redundancy. This is why I left two empty slots. Like, maybe adding one 2TB into slots 5 and 6 will add at least 1TB capacity over what I have now (or is that 2TB ) ? Later, I can replace the existing 1TB's in pairs (like, if I replaced 2 more 1TB's with 2TB's I gain another 1TB).

Am I misunderstanding something?

I was assuming you had a four slot unit. You can get more space by using your two empty slots. If you add 2 more disks ( 1 TB or greater) then your array will expand by 2 TB, and any extra will be wasted for now, until you upgrade the second pair to the larger size. You are still subject to the 8 TiB growth limit, so you couldn't expand the volume beyond 10 TiB unless you do a factory reset.

So then the question becomes how big you want the larger drive size to be. It is more cost-effective to use bigger drives if you look at GB/dollar. But of course the drives do cost more. Also, your storage needs appear to be pretty small, since the 2 TB volume you have now has lasted you 4 years.

So options are likely 2 TB drives or 3 TB drives. At current pricing if you use WDC Red drives:

(1) adding 2x2TB will cost $220 (Amazon). You gain 2 TB of space - double what you have now.
(2) Upgrading 1 pair costs another $220. You can another 2 TB of space.
(3) upgrading the last pair costs another $220. You gain 2 TB of space.

So the total project is $660 for 6 TB.

Doing the same with 3 TB drives gives you
(1) Adding 2x3TB costs you $260. You gain 2 TB of space
(2) upgrading another pair costs you another $260. But you gain 4 TB of space.
(3) upgrading the final pair costs you another $260. You gain another 4 TB, but you need to do a factory reset.
(3a) upgrading just one of the final drives costs $130, and gains you 2 TB without the reset.

Stopping at step (2) gives you 6 TB of growth for only $520 - $140 cheaper than going with 2 TB.

Basically the price difference between 2TB and 3TB drives is small enough ($20 at the moment) that you might as well go with 3 TB.

If you want to stick with enterprise drives, you can do the same math easily enough with whatever models you want to use.

Also, you should update your firmware, 4.2.12 is very old.

vandermerwe wrote:
Also, you should update your firmware, 4.2.12 is very old.

+1. You need to update to at least 4.2.16 before adding any drives with capacity larger than 2TB.

I agree on the firmware of course.

Also, since the drives are aging, I would do an disk scrub on the existing disks before making any changes to the volume, and then examine the SMART stats for each drive.

And of course, back it up!

Thanks all for the detailed responses. I will need some time to digest the info and find where I can buy the drives. Also, the 3TB's vs. 2TB's upgrade comparison is very nice to see - I appreciate the detailed example provided.

First, yes I will need to updated my firmware. I originally stopped upgrades at v .12 because of an issue I ran into sharing an Outlook .pst from the NAS (to all pc's on the network). Now, since I have taken the .pst file off the NAS, I can upgrade the firmware.

I have two couple of questions so far from what I read.

1.

StephenB wrote:
I was assuming you had a four slot unit. You can get more space by using your two empty slots. If you add 2 more disks ( 1 TB or greater) then your array will expand by 2 TB, and any extra will be wasted for now, until you upgrade the second pair to the larger size....

Are you saying if I added only one 2TB (to empty slot #5), I only gain 1TB (over current capacity), and only if I add another 2TB (to empty slot #6) will I gain a full 2 TB of space?

2. I am comparing the two upgrade routes you listed (THANKS for this!), and want to understand what you stated:

For upgrading with 2TB's:

StephenB wrote:
(1) adding 2x2TB ... You gain 2 TB of space - double what you have now.

and
For upgrading with 3TB's:

StephenB wrote:
(1) Adding 2x3TB ... You gain 2 TB of space

Does adding a pair of 3TB's (into empty slots #5 and #6) yield only 2 TB of space, which is the SAME as adding a pair of 2TB's? If yes, why is this? I originally thought adding the pair of 3TB's yields a gain of 3 TB of space.


3. How dependable are 3TB's now? When I first purchased the NAS in 2000, I read of many issues with drives larger than 1.5TB. This is the main reason I decided to start with 4x 1TB's.

4. Will there be a good chance SATA drives will not be found (at least at good prices) over the next four to six years time frame, replaced by Solid State drives? This
is one concern as having SATA's either no longer being manufactured or sky-rocket in price because of limited supply will limit my future upgrade abilities.

5. Where are good vendors to search for good supply of approved (on HCL) drives? I tried Tiger Direct and Directron (two vendors I am familiar with) but cannot find any approved drives.

winger13 wrote:

1. Are you saying if I added only one 2TB (to empty slot #5), I only gain 1TB (over current capacity), and only if I add another 2TB (to empty slot #6) will I gain a full 2 TB of space? ... 2. Does adding a pair of 3TB's (into empty slots #5 and #6) yield only 2 TB of space, which is the SAME as adding a pair of 2TB's? If yes, why is this? I originally thought adding the pair of 3TB's yields a gain of 3 TB of space.

These are related questions.

When you have more than one disk size in the array, the xraid creates "layers" of separate raid arrays. Each RAID layer is separate (has its own independent RAID protection), and all are spanned by a single file system so as a user you don't see any of this complexity.

For example, say you have 2x1TB+4x3TB. installed. You have a 6x1 TB "base layer" across all drives (same size as the smallest drives). And a 4x2 TB "upper layer" across the 3 TB drives, which uses the extra space. Since you are using dual redundancy, both layers need to be RAID-6 - which needs 4 drives in the layer. You have that with these disks, so there is no problem.

If you were using single redundancy, you'd use RAID-5 in both layers.

if you have 4x1TB+2x3TB installed (step 1), you'd have a 6x1TB base and a 2x2TB upper layer. The upper layer only has 2 drives, so it isn't enough for raid-6 / dual redundancy. That is why step-1 only expands 2 TB, even if you add 2x4TB or even the new 2x6TB drive models. xraid2 won't/can't use the upper layer, because it doesn't have enough drives in it.

It would be able to use it for single-redundancy, and in this configuration xraid would use RAID-5 for the base layer, and RAID-1 for the upper layer.

If you were using flexraid instead, you set up the layers manually (with one volume for each). With flexraid you'd have the option to create a "c" volume with dual-redundancy (RAID-6) on the 1x6 TB base, and a "d" volume with single redundancy (RAID-1) on the upper layer. But XRAID2 won't do that. You can switch to flexraid, but you'd need to do a factory reset - rebuilding the NAS from scratch and reloading your data from backups.

winger13 wrote:
3. How dependable are 3TB's now? When I first purchased the NAS I read of many issues with drives larger than 1.5TB. This is the main reason I decided to start with 4x 1TB's.

First, you made the right choice back then. I didn't, and purchased many 1.5 TB seagates (USB and desktop). I wasn't using these in a NAS or RAID, and they began failing very quickly. One is still working, the others all died prematurely. I was fortunate not to lose data.

But this problem was solved in the second generation of 2 TB drives that followed. 3 TB drives have been out for a while, and in my experience are just as reliable as 1 TB or 2 TB models.

There isn't much data available to consumers that compares manufacturer reliability. There is an interesting article here: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/wh ... uld-i-buy/

winger13 wrote:
4. Will there be a good chance SATA drives will not be found (at least at good prices) over the next four to six years time frame, replaced by Solid State drives? This is one concern as having SATA's either no longer being manufactured or sky-rocket in price because of limited supply will limit my future upgrade abilities.

SSDs are getting cheaper, and getting bigger. Crucial sells a 980 GB model with a street price of less than $500. It could be nice if they replaced hard drives, they are a lot faster. Though I think traditional disks in the larger sizes will remain available for a long time - smaller hard drive sizes on the other hand will be replaced by SSD much sooner. I have no crystal ball, but with current pricing that seems to be the likely outcome.

winger13 wrote:
5. Where are good vendors to search for good supply of approved (on HCL) drives? I tried Tiger Direct and Directron (two vendors I am familiar with) but cannot find any approved drives.

The bad news here is that Netgear is not updating the HCL as new drives become available. And they continue to deny support to people off the HCL. That creates a bad situation for us users. Most of the drives aren't available because they have been replaced with newer models. You can find the WD20EFRX and the WD30EFRX at both Tiger Direct and Directron.

I don't recommend using "green"consumer drives in the NAS. The WDC Red (and the seagate NAS line) are just as environmentally friendly, and are much better choices. After my bad Seagate experience I switched to Western Digital (though I know others have moved the other way because they had a bad run of WDC drives...). Personally I've never used enterprise drives, so I have no advice there.

OK, back to this project after a little episode with a bad power supply (that is another thread).

I am starting to settle on the idea of upgrading (bays 5 and 6) with two 3TB's. I reviewed articles on WD Red, Seagate NAS and Hitachi HGST. The following is one of several writeups I have come across.

First, I know the Netgear HCL only lists the WD Red, not the other two.

Second, as the article points out, WD and Seagate both state their HD's are from 1-5 Bay units. Does this mean if I go with the HCL'd WD Red in my 6-Bay RNPP unit, there could a good chance I will run into issues?

What are folks' thoughts of going w/ the Hitachi's, even though Netgear has not added this model to the HCL. Hitachi seems to have a very good track record, so I am thinking it is only a matter of time before it gets added to the HCL list. I am all for reliability and stability, install and 'forget about it'.

http://www.storagetimes.com/review/nas- ... benchmark/

I don't think there is any issue with the 6 bay setup. When launched, WDC specifically listed the pro-6 as compatible. I've been running 5 WDC Reds plus one older seagate in my pro-6 for quite a while now with no problems.

The HGST appears to be the fastest performer from the review, though it also uses quite a bit more power. HGST drives have a good reputation.

The HCL is long overdue for an update, I have no idea when that will occur.