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ReadyNAS 3100 Maximum HDD size?
Greetings,
I soon will be receiving a ReadyNAS 3100 for personal/home use. While I understand that, according to the compatibility chart, the maximum size of HDD supported is 3TB per drive, I am wondering if anyone have any experience in using >=4TB drives on ReadyNAS-3100?
I also understand that if I used a HD that is not on the compability chart I won't get any official support. However, since this will be for personal use, I simply want to invest my money wisely. Instead of buying 4x 3TB drives I like to purchase 4x 5TB or even 4x 6TB drives to maximize the storage/dollar ratio. I currently have 3x 4TB drives on my personal server so I may simply buy one additional 4TB drives and migrate slowly.
Any help is very much appreciated,
You can use larger disks. The hardware HCL hasn't been updated in some years (Netgear stopped qualifying disks for your system quite a while ago). I do recommend either NAS-purposed disks (WDC Red or Seagate Ironwolf) or enterprise class drives for your NAS.
There are two expansion limits that apply to OS 4.2 systems like the 3100
- a volume cannot be expanded over a 16 TiB ceiling
- a volume cannot be expanded more than 8 TiB from it's starting size
Both of these limits do create practical limitations that you should take into account when selecting the disk sizes. In particular, 4x6TB yields a volume size of 18 TB. You can do a factory install with 4x6TB drives, but it would not be expandable.
One thing I suggest is converting your 3100 to run OS-6, which has no known expansion limits. That isn't supported by Netgear, but since your 3100 is used, you can't get support from them anyway.
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You can use larger disks. The hardware HCL hasn't been updated in some years (Netgear stopped qualifying disks for your system quite a while ago). I do recommend either NAS-purposed disks (WDC Red or Seagate Ironwolf) or enterprise class drives for your NAS.
There are two expansion limits that apply to OS 4.2 systems like the 3100
- a volume cannot be expanded over a 16 TiB ceiling
- a volume cannot be expanded more than 8 TiB from it's starting size
Both of these limits do create practical limitations that you should take into account when selecting the disk sizes. In particular, 4x6TB yields a volume size of 18 TB. You can do a factory install with 4x6TB drives, but it would not be expandable.
One thing I suggest is converting your 3100 to run OS-6, which has no known expansion limits. That isn't supported by Netgear, but since your 3100 is used, you can't get support from them anyway.
Thank you for the prompt reply, very much appreciated. With regarding to OS-6, can you please confirm that the steps at post #3 at the following link is what you are referring to?
regards,
Those are the steps (particularly the 3-step version at the end). Though this might be more clear:
- BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP
- Download PREP4TOR6_0.1-x86 .bin
- Install it it as an add-on using the ReadyNAS web ui, and do not reboot afterwards (avoids the need to do manual factory resets)
- Download R4toR6_6.9.5 .bin
- Install it as a firmware update using the ReadyNAS web ui
- After you install the addon+firmware and reboot, it will update the firmware and start a factory default.
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