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Forum Discussion
WD Compatibility
Two questions:
1. I have two WD Elements and one WD My Book. I did a brief search for compatibile drives with the 104 and only came up with about three for WD. Is that right or was I looking in the wrong place? Will my drives work in this NAS?
2. Will any kind of format/data loss happen? Saw a review mentioning 10 hours of formatting work on 3 hard drives. I'm just worried I'll lose stuff.
29 Replies
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Hi LDG,
Check our ReadyNAS HCL and ensure you have the following selected in searching for all supported WD drives.
With regard to using your used hard drives, this might give you errors and the data from it will not be read by the ReadyNAS (so make sure it's been backed up or saved somewhere else). In order for you to use them, you need to reset the ReadyNAS to factory default with these disks are inserted. This forces any existing partitions from previous use of the disks to be deleted, so the ReadyNAS can use the disks.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
BrianL
NETGEAR Community Team
BrianL2 wrote:Hi LDG,
Check our ReadyNAS HCL and ensure you have the following selected in searching for all supported WD drives.
With regard to using your used hard drives, this might give you errors and the data from it will not be read by the ReadyNAS (so make sure it's been backed up or saved somewhere else). In order for you to use them, you need to reset the ReadyNAS to factory default with these disks are inserted. This forces any existing partitions from previous use of the disks to be deleted, so the ReadyNAS can use the disks.
Hope this helps!
Kind regards,
BrianL
NETGEAR Community TeamI addressed a detail I neglected to mention in my response to StephenB-my drives are currently incases/enclosures and I will be removing those to put them in the NAS (that probably answers why they don't show up on compatibility checks). However to your last point, I don't have this NAS yet, so the first drives that go in will be these. Should take care of needing to factory default, yes?
LDG wrote:
Two questions:
1. I have two WD Elements and one WD My Book. ...Will my drives work in this NAS?
These are USB drives, correct? The HCL Brian mentions is for internal hard drives that are installed in the NAS.
The NAS is not a USB dock - it is intended to be used with internal drives like the WD40EFRX.
StephenB wrote:
LDG wrote:Two questions:
1. I have two WD Elements and one WD My Book. ...Will my drives work in this NAS?
These are USB drives, correct? The HCL Brian mentions is for internal hard drives that are installed in the NAS.
The NAS is not a USB dock - it is intended to be used with internal drives like the WD40EFRX.
You are correct! My plan is to remove the drives from their enclosures. Way out of warranty on all three. I forgot to mention that detail when I posted this. Will this still work?
LDG wrote:
You are correct! My plan is to remove the drives from their enclosures. Way out of warranty on all three. I forgot to mention that detail when I posted this. Will this still work?
It might work - not all drives are well-suited for RAID. You will likely be denied support from Netgear if you run into problems.
IMO It'd be better to get new drives.
The WD Element probably has a WD Green drive inside. The WD MyBook probably has a similar drive. These are considered "desktop" drives which are not recommened for use in a NAS because the are not designed for the constant uptime that a NAS often has. In addition, the drives in those enclosures are probably 5400rpm drives. It is usually recommended to get NAS quality drives (like WD Red or Seagate NAS drives), which have a longer MTBF rating and spin at the faster 7200 rpm speed.
You can certainly try using the drives in the readyNAS and I suspect they will work. The question will be, for how long.
In any case, any data currently on the drives will be erased when you install the drives into the ReadyNAS so you should back up anything currently on the drives that you want to save.
Hope that helps.
David
dschwartzer wrote:
The WD Element probably has a WD Green drive inside. The WD MyBook probably has a similar drive.
I've never opened one, so I don't know. If they are WDC desktop drives (green or otherwise), then WD's recommendation is here: http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=996
StephenB wrote:
dschwartzer wrote:The WD Element probably has a WD Green drive inside. The WD MyBook probably has a similar drive.
I've never opened one, so I don't know. If they are WDC desktop drives (green or otherwise), then WD's recommendation is here: http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=996
Well that's frustrating. Anybody have an alternative? Something that won't require the drives to be formatted? Something that allows them to be connected to the network without having to go through a computer? I'll take them out of their enclosures...that part I don't care about.
- Let's say I buy a 2 bay disk less NAS and then a 1 tb to put in it. Once that is used up and I buy the second drive, will I have to format the first when adding the second?
LDG wrote:
Let's say I buy a 2 bay disk less NAS and then a 1 tb to put in it. Once that is used up and I buy the second drive, will I have to format the first when adding the second?There are two basic scenarios, depending on whether you are using jbod or xraid. Either way the NAS formats the drives.
With jbod, the simplest thing to do when the disk is full is to add a second disk (which would be its own volume). After that second disk becomes full, you'd need to get a larger one, destroy the first volume, remove the drive, and install the new larger disk. All data on the volume is lost, so you need to restore it from a backup,
With xraid, you actually want to start with 2 disks (say 2 x 1 TB). When you need to expand, you buy two larger replacements (say 2x4TB). First you'd insert the first 4 TB drive (with the NAS running). After the volume resyncs, you'd replace insert the second 4 TB drive (again with the NAS running). The NAS will then expand the volume to the larger size. There is no loss of data.
StephenB wrote:
LDG wrote:
Let's say I buy a 2 bay disk less NAS and then a 1 tb to put in it. Once that is used up and I buy the second drive, will I have to format the first when adding the second?There are two basic scenarios, depending on whether you are using jbod or xraid. Either way the NAS formats the drives.
With jbod, the simplest thing to do when the disk is full is to add a second disk (which would be its own volume). After that second disk becomes full, you'd need to get a larger one, destroy the first volume, remove the drive, and install the new larger disk. All data on the volume is lost, so you need to restore it from a backup,
With xraid, you actually want to start with 2 disks (say 2 x 1 TB). When you need to expand, you buy two larger replacements (say 2x4TB). First you'd insert the first 4 TB drive (with the NAS running). After the volume resyncs, you'd replace insert the second 4 TB drive (again with the NAS running). The NAS will then expand the volume to the larger size. There is no loss of data.
Xraid sounds much better...pretty much what I do anyway, actually. The downside is finding a way to keep the the first disks connected. I simply like having constant access to everything. Xraid allows for expansion the way I would like it to, but then I still have two disks that I'd like to continue to be accessible.
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