Any news on whether ReadyNAS models can cope with 6TB drives?
I am not asking or expecting NetGear to have tested and certified such drives as yet, this is more to establish whether any ReadyNAS models can cope with such large capacity drives.
6TB drives will be supported by all the current generation ReadyNAS products. The only caveat is some models may reach a volume limit which means you will need to utilize multiple volumes (which is supported by all ReadyNAS products).
All the math in these articles assume the drives don't exceed the URE specs on their datasheets. That is perhaps questionable - some drives are far worse than their datasheets, others seem to outperform. I am also not convinced that an unrecoverable read error is a random event (which is also tacitly assumed by the statistics). I expect a healthy drive to have no UREs, and the UREs begin to happen as the drive fails.
If you read these forums, you will see many cases where disk errors occur during RAID recovery - requiring users to recover data from backup, or attempt to clone drives to conceal the errors. Personally I continue to use RAID-5 on my Pro, and maintain full multiple backups of the data.
The decision to go with single/dual redundancy should based on the need to keep the data available during disk replacement (or the convenience of avoiding recovery from backup as much as possible). Dual redundancy fails much less often, but you still need backups even with RAID-6.
6TB drives will be supported by all the current generation ReadyNAS products. The only caveat is some models may reach a volume limit which means you will need to utilize multiple volumes (which is supported by all ReadyNAS products).
Which models will hit the volume limit? I have a ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition. I currently have 6x2TB created originally as 6x2TB with ext4 compatible firmware when I did this. Can it grow to 6x6TB without having to factory reset?
On a related topic, I have a support ticket open and still not answered regarding how much the new OS6 models can grow. Can for example a 3220 grow from 12x2TB to 12x4TB or even 12x6TB without needing a factory reset. (I am wondering if the new BTFRS allows unlimited growth.)
If you are running RAIDiator 4.2.x you can't expand past 16TB and can't expand by more than 8TB though you can do a factory default with the disks in place.
In ReadyNAS OS BTRFS should support practically "unlimited" expansion for the foreseeable future.
I have added 3 6TB drives to my readynas ultra 6, alongside 3 older 5tb drives. X-Raid2. I have not gotten it to expand beyond using 5TB (well, 4653GB) each, but it recognizes the larger drives.
