I have a Readynas NV+ running the latest firmware which currently uses 4x 1.5 TB drives in an X-raid configuration. I would really like to expand my volume using 4x 2 TB drives as I am right up against my current capacity. It seems like almost all the high capacity drives on the market now use 4K sectors, even though there is little technical reason for them to do so. From my reading, I can't switch to using 4K sector drives without having to reset my NV+ to factory defaults. This would be problematic for me, to say the least, as I have a fairly complex setup involving many user accounts, backup jobs, rsync, etc.
Is there anywhere that still sells 2 TB drives that are verifiably non 4K? Preferably at a reasonable price. A lot of the drives currently on the HCL that are supposed to be non 4K have now switched to 4K sectors, despite not changing model numbers / SKUs. This makes it extremely difficult to find drives. I spent a couple hours on Amazon and Newegg driving myself nuts.
I have gotten some from Amazon. Not cheap but reasonable. Search by the exact model number from the compatibility list and be careful, Amazon will also show you other model numbers. I almost selected and ordered the wrong one once. I could have used it elsewhere but it would have cost time to order again.
My problem is that a lot of the drives listed as compatible appear to have shifted to using 4K sectors with little to no announcement of that fact. I am really hesitant to shell out $$$ without explicitly knowing in advance, especially as a lot of these drives listed on Amazon are actually being sold by oddball 3rd parties with mixed customer response.
Some of those Hitachi enterprise drives which are presumably still compatible are $220-240 each. New 2TB HDDs with 4k sectors are like $80. For that price, I could buy a new Readynas Ultra 4 and 4x 2TB HDDs.
I am basically looking for someone to comment "I bought these drives at this store a week ago and can confirm they are 512b drives."
Eventually the only 2TB drives available will be 4k sector ones. So even if you buy 512-byte drives now you'll have to be prepared that if a disk fails under warranty it might be replaced by a 4k sector one via RMA.
It's unfortunate that a factory default is required to get 4k sector alignment on Sparc systems but there's nothing NetGear can do about that.
Rocketman12 - it seems that your major complaint about doing a factory default is redoing the configuration. You can back up your configuration. That choice is under the system button on the menu. It will copy down a zip file onto your computer. Locate the zip file for future reference. Then back up all of your data. You can remove the current drives and then install the new drives and do another factory default.
You can then follow the instructions on restoring the configuration and then you restore your data from the backup.
I agree with the others though, that if you are running out of room with 1.5TB drives, going to only 2TB drives does not seem as an effective use of funds. You will be going from a volume of 4.2TB to one of 5.6TB. However, by going with an Ultra 4 with 3x3TB drives, you will have the same effective volume of 5.6TB with an empty slot to expand by another 2.7TB. (net after overhead). I can understand though that this may shred your budget, but something to consider long term.
If you go with an Ultra, you would have to manually set up the configuration. You can do what I did, with the configuration of one machine open in one browser window and the new machine in a second, and simply copy the setup on screen. Or you could take notes. You might also consider taking screen shots and print them out. There is always more that one way to skin that cat.
