Hi All,I have a query. I bought 2 of these 2TB green drives (WD20EARS-00MVWB1 WD Caviar Green 2TB). I know there is a lot of complaints about them, but they are a very decent price and that capacity is just what I need as I run out of space on my 1TB Duo drives.Here's the thing. Backing up everything to an External USB drive is PAINFULLY SLOW on the Duo, even with fast writes enabled. I am stunned by how dreadful it is. It's actually quicker for me to copy across the network and hop via my desktop PC to the USB drive!! Anyway, it has taken me absolutely days to get through a lot of the data on my NAS drives... but I'd like to know if the following is possible:I'd like to pop out the 1TB drives and put in the 2TB green drives. Do the whole config thing (4k firmware write?) and set up on the new drives and then copy whats on the USB drive back across onto the NAS with the new 2TB drives in it.If I should pop these out and put the old 1TB drives back in... will they still work with all the old data there? It may sound lame, but I'd like to get most of my data up and running on the new 2TB disks and slowly move the remaining old data later since it takes SOOOO damn long to copy off to USB.What do people think? Should I be able to swap between pairs of 1TB and 2TB so long as drives maintain their slot numbers, etc?Thanks

Yes you can power down and put the old drives back in.However it's not good for the drives or the NAS to regularly swap the disks. You should backup your data now and keep the 1TB drives for a while just in case there's a problem with your backup, not instead of a backup.

Hi There,Thanks for the advice. I only intend to do this to get things up and running in my end state. I'll probably only swap back once and then do a final run of data copies. I'm basically putting off the backup/copy off of probably 600GB of AVI files... that is going to take foreevvveeeerrrrrr! I dread to think how long it will take given the time it took to do the 400GB of other stuff...I also like your idea of holding onto the 1TBs for a bit after the new disks are in place...

Well, this made me laugh... 6 days, 22 hours for 545GB of data, all large files... Pffff...

If you are copying over the network to an external drive attached to a PC, it should be much faster. Many times that calculation is way off. May times when copying large files from my NAS to my PC it will tell me it's going to take 24 hours (half way through after 5 minutes, only to have it complete 5 minutes later!). I have a tendency to pay far more attention to the number of files left vs total and number of giga/mega bytes left vs total. It would be interesting how long it actually takes.

Yep, sadly that's exactly what I'm doing. I dread to think what the time would be locally attached to the ReadyNAS.Currently running at a pretty constant 1,015kb/s. I haven't seen any fluctuations in the amount of time left or files remaing.Would be nicer if my Netgear router was gigabit, but unfortunately its only 100MbitHere's another question though come to think of it... Does the copy from a locally attached USB on the ReadyNAS go any quicker since its a read rather than a write operation?

Drive Upgrades - WD20EARS-00MVWB1 WD Caviar Green 2TB

13 Replies

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mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Dec 30, 2011
Yes you can power down and put the old drives back in.

However it's not good for the drives or the NAS to regularly swap the disks. You should backup your data now and keep the 1TB drives for a while just in case there's a problem with your backup, not instead of a backup.
thekuttingedge
Aspirant
Dec 31, 2011
Hi There,

Thanks for the advice. I only intend to do this to get things up and running in my end state. I'll probably only swap back once and then do a final run of data copies. I'm basically putting off the backup/copy off of probably 600GB of AVI files... that is going to take foreevvveeeerrrrrr! I dread to think how long it will take given the time it took to do the 400GB of other stuff...

I also like your idea of holding onto the 1TBs for a bit after the new disks are in place...
thekuttingedge
Aspirant
Jan 01, 2012
Well, this made me laugh... 6 days, 22 hours for 545GB of data, all large files... Pffff...
PapaBear1
Apprentice
Jan 01, 2012
If you are copying over the network to an external drive attached to a PC, it should be much faster. Many times that calculation is way off. May times when copying large files from my NAS to my PC it will tell me it's going to take 24 hours (half way through after 5 minutes, only to have it complete 5 minutes later!). I have a tendency to pay far more attention to the number of files left vs total and number of giga/mega bytes left vs total. It would be interesting how long it actually takes.
thekuttingedge
Aspirant
Jan 01, 2012
Yep, sadly that's exactly what I'm doing. I dread to think what the time would be locally attached to the ReadyNAS.

Currently running at a pretty constant 1,015kb/s. I haven't seen any fluctuations in the amount of time left or files remaing.

Would be nicer if my Netgear router was gigabit, but unfortunately its only 100Mbit

Here's another question though come to think of it... Does the copy from a locally attached USB on the ReadyNAS go any quicker since its a read rather than a write operation?
NickHW
Aspirant
Jan 01, 2012
thekuttingedge wrote:
Would be nicer if my Netgear router was gigabit, but unfortunately its only 100Mbit

Why don't you just pick up a $25 gigabit switch and hang the router and your devices off that?
PapaBear1
Apprentice
Jan 01, 2012
The 100Mb/s ports on your router is the source of your bottleneck. When I went to a gigabit switch and connected my NV+ and desktops to that, it more than doubled my transfer speed. I connected my printers which are not affected by the bottleneck of 100Mb/s ports to the router directly.
thekuttingedge
Aspirant
Jan 03, 2012
Hi Guys,

Wow, it's one debacle after another in my house... so, the desktop I am hanging my USB drive off went pop! Turns out after a lot of picking through what could be wrong that one (or more) of the memory modules has decided it doesn't like team sports anymore. Therefore, the desktop is back up with only 1GB of RAM in it! New memory is on it's way...

Yeah, the DSL router is the bottleneck for sure... I could just buy a Gigabit switch which is actually a nice and pretty cheap fix, but I will (in time) replace this router with a DSL router that supports Gigabit ports and also the wireless n standard so that my laptop and tablet can benefit from the speed boost too.

In the meantime, does anyone have an opinion on my other question? The copy back of data once the ReadyNAS is singing on 2TB drives... having this local would be equally slow to read from as it is to write to? Just wondering because I'd love to remove my desktop from the equation.

Thanks
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Jan 03, 2012
thekuttingedge wrote:
Currently running at a pretty constant 1,015kb/s.
Do you mean kilobits per second or kilobytes per second?
thekuttingedge
Aspirant
Jan 07, 2012
Do you mean kilobits per second or kilobytes per second?

bytes... which I read as just under an MB, no?

I was foolishly using WinSCP... as soon as I did just a straight Windows CIFS copy the transfer jumped up to 5.50MB/s

Now copying onto the new drives at that same rate. Will be done shortly, hopefully.

Still wondering if it's worth doing a direct hook-up to the NAS for the copy back..