4tb drive support

All x86 devices support 3tb and larger drives. The sparc devices, nv+/duo and older models, will only support 2tb drives max.

It is still possible for various individual drive models to have problems or don't like to be in raid, but in general if you have an x86 device, you should be good.

Assuming they are fundamentally the same as 3tb drives (ie regular sata drives), we shouldn't have any problems.

But there is only one 4tb available now anyway, the seagate external drive.

TeknoJnky wrote:
All x86 devices support 3tb and larger drives. The sparc devices, nv+/duo and older models, will only support 2tb drives max.

Is this a hardware limitation, or is it just a software limitation that it's not expected that NetGEAR will put any time and effort in to?

(I was sort of hoping that it would be lifted with this last update, but, no.)
B!

Mr_B wrote:
is it just a software limitation that it's not expected that NetGEAR will put any time and effort in to?

Correct

Just to confirm, as I'm a bit of a newb on this sort of thing, does this mean 3TB will never work in my ReadyNAS NV+ ? Or that there is no official support, but I'm welcome to try one out, and it might just work fine ?

Would be a bit annoyed if the £500 box I bought to provide long-term upgradeable storage in my home network has actually hit it's limit within 3 years ?!

phantomwhale wrote:
Just to confirm, as I'm a bit of a newb on this sort of thing, does this mean 3TB will never work in my ReadyNAS NV+ ?

That is correct

There are innumerable posts on this topic if you search the forum eg

viewtopic.php?f=24&t=56396&p=321551#p318878

Hmmmmm, Ok, thanks for confirming.

Thanks for the information; it’s a shame that Netgear is apparently not going to invest the resources to increase the support for larger drives. As mentions above, 3TB drives are available and I can only assume that larger drives are only around the corner. Thanks for the information; I guess if the system no longer works to my needs I will begin to shop for other options. I plan on waiting for 4TB drives to become available before I start buying again. Hopefully by then Netgear will have changed their stance on this.

To be clear - Netgear *will* support 4TB drives but not with the older Sparc based products such as the NV+ and Duo. There are significant technical issues that prevents this and given the full availability of the Ultra products, which are far more capable and already support 3TB drives for example, this decision is extremely unlikely to ever change.

When the other thread stated that 3rd party development ceased, he was referring to the Linux community. In order to redo the foundation upon which the sparc version of Raidiator is based, the ReadyNAS team would have to have the resources that the Linux community has, which they don't, and then develop it for what is frankly an obsolete platform. I know that sounds harsh, but I have a trusty 4 year old NV+ myself. When it was developed 6 years ago, it was a good competitor, but they did what Apple and other device manufacturers have done and converted to the faster more powerful x86 platform which is still developing. Even my NVX is discontinued as it was 32bit and now all the new units (Ultras and Pros) are 64bit. Even my NVX unit is 3x as fast in file transfer than my NV+.

I moved from my NV+ and 500GB drives to my NVX with 1TB drives and have now expanded the NVX partially with 2x3Tb drives and 2x1TB drives. Another feature of the x86 platform is the ability to layer the array so that you can have 2 different drive sizes and use all the space (once you have achieved redundancy with two of the larger drives).

You might want to go ahead and consider an Ultra or a Pro with 3TB drives, and use the NV+ for at least a partial backup of the critical files using rsync. This is an extremely fast NAS to NAS backup method. All ReadyNAS units have this ability, although not all the competitors do. The Ultra4s and Pro4s are as well built as your NV+ and should be as reliable. I love my NVX and even my old friend, my NV+, still chugging along.

Hello all. I just wanted to add that at least for the ReadyNAS 1100, disks greater than 2TB are supported when attached as USB drives. However, I was unable to format a 3TB with FAT32 using the onboard utility so I formatted it FAT32 and then attached the drive ( a WD My Book 3TB). Also, because of a FAT32 partition size limitation in Windows I had to use a 3rd party utility to format it FAT32 with a 3TB partition.

This was done under firmware 4.1.7 and the new firmware 4.1.8 specifically says drives greater than 2TB are not supported. I've upgraded the firmware and can still see the 3TB external USB drive and I'll see if it works again when we attach another 3TB external USB drive later.