Ultra 4 Drive Replacement and Upgrade

Of course, putting a backup plan in place is the most effective way to protect your data from loss.

I've been running the WD30EFRX in my Pro-6 and my RN102 and have been quite pleased with them. They've performed well, run cool, and are quiet.

There was a short time last fall when WDC mistuned the firmware, resulting in increasing load-cycle counts. So you should make sure the drive firmware is up to date before you install. You can also adjust the head parking settings with a tool from WDC. This issue never affected me, but there are some posts here about it.

If you can live without the data for a bit, I'd be inclined to do the "start from scratch".

One benefit of rebuilding is that if something goes wrong with the backup restore, you can fallback to powering down the NAS, and reinserting the original two drives (other two slots empty). The disadvantage is that your data will be unavailable for a couple of days.

If you started with 2 TB drives, then you can't expand beyond 10 TB volume size. That wouldn't be a problem right now (you'll end up at 9 TB), but it would be an issue if you upgraded to 4 TB drives later on. Rebuilding from scratch would let you expand up to 16 TB in the future.

Thanks, I think I'll start from scratch as I can live without the NAS for a few days if necessary.

I was under the impression that the Ultra 4 only supported drives up to 3TB but I notice there's a 4TB model (Hitachi 7k4000 HUS724040ALE640) in the HCL - it's probably out of my price range though. Is the HCL still being updated for the Ultra 4 do you know?

Backup Plan: that thing you wish you had just after a double disk failure.

EDIT

Four WD drives are now winging their way to me :-)

Over all fairly please with 9TB of usable storage for <£400. Would have been nice to have had a bit of a better selection in the HCL though as I suspect a lot more drives probably would work fine.

I agree the HCL is very dated, and that many other drives would work fine.

Though generally speaking I think the WDC Red drives and the Seagate NAS drives are the obvious choices right now. They are priced nearly as low as desktop drives, have longer warranties, and are intended for home NAS use. The Seagates aren't on the current HCL though.

I've now got all four 3TB WD drives fitted and the re-sync complete :-). I'm just copying all the data back onto the NAS which will take a few hours.

I had a right game with finding screws to mount the new drives. I'm sure the NAS came with some screws but that was three years ago (or maybe more) so they are long gone. I ended up robbing screws from around the case which I replaced with regular computer pan heads (of which I have loads). I found that you can take the panels off which gives you four screws straight away but internally there are other screws that can be removed and replaced with pan heads. There's a convenient gap between the outer panel and the case which is enough for it to slide over a pan head screw. I managed to recover the 8 screws this way which is all I needed.

I've checked the load cycle count after 18 hours and it's still at 1 which I'm pleased to see. Most of that time was during the re-sync but there was certainly a good portion where the heads could have been unloaded if the timer was short. From what I've read the problem seemed to be confined to the 4TB WD red drives though.

Thanks for your help.

Great.

LCC in single digits suggests that your thresholds are fine. Mine are around 200 after 5000-10000 power-on hours (with spindown enabled, but it doesn't kick in often). I'm not convinced that high LCC effects drive life much anyway - I have some EZRX green drives with counts in the 800K-1.3M range. I pulled them out of the NAS, but they are running fine in a PC despite the high counts.

wobblycogs wrote:
I had a right game with finding screws to mount the new drives.

For future reference, what you need is Supermicro part number MCP-410-00005-0N, a bag of 100 screws for hot-swap 3.5-inch HDD trays.

On Amazon, it's currently available for $6.59 with free shipping: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00353EKR8/.

Unfortunately for me I'm in the UK so shipping would be an eye watering $45. I did manage to find a couple of shops on ebay selling screws that would probably fit (#6-32 1/4"). At 1/4" they are a bit longer than the screws the NAS ships with but that would be easy enough to fix with a file. To be honest I can't see me ever replacing the pan heads I've fitted now but thanks for the link.,

Ouch. Yes, that does seem a little excessive.

I found this UK source pretty quickly -- not for you, necessarily, but for someone else who might read this in the future -- and there are probably other local distributors whose prices would be even cheaper:
http://www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount-case-accessories/1u-io-shields/supermicro-screw-bag-100-pcs-and-label-for-24x-hot-swap-3.5-hdd-tray-mcp410000050n/

£1.23 + VAT + Delivery = £12.28. Still expensive, but maybe workable.