Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB

majayjay wrote:
What if you installed the drives into the readynas and then start using it, then down the road there is a new firmware revision that Netgear ends up blessing? In this scenario, can a firmware update be done to the drives without losing the information that is already on the drive?

Well, no and yes...

Even if we're told differently, I would assume that the data on the drive will be lost, but the array will have all of the data in a degraded mode. So, if I have to update my firmware in the future, I'll pull one drive, update the firmware and reinsert it to the NAS. If the array needs to be resynced, I'll let that happen. Once resync is complete and the array is redundant again, I'll pull the next and so on, and thus shouldn't have any data loss.

In any event, I think a full backup of the NAS is cheap insurance. If a drives fails during the resync, or something else goes wrong, you'll have a time consuming data recovery project on your hands.