I have owned several ReadNAS boxes (RN600, three NV+, and a Ultra 6 Plus) and have had nothing but success installing and running these units 7X24 in a home and small business environment. I recently fired up my third NV+ and decided to use some WD Black 1TB drives (WD1002FAEX) I had and to my surprise it really did not like them. I knew they were not on the HCL but figured that they were solid drives especially since they had a 5 year warranty. After spending a bit of time trying to get them to work I decided to test them with the WD diagnostics and found one drive failed the SMART test and the other was so dead it could not even be seen by the diagnostic program. These were brand new (never used) so I'm getting warranty replacements from WD but have two more of these drives that are brand new and test OK but I'm afraid that the NV+ is somehow corrupting them.
First of all, is it possible that the NV+ is corrupting the drives and secondly, what makes a drive get on the HCL. Also, is there an HCL failure list bcause I think this would help steer people away from certain drives.
Like I said, it would be nice to see an "incompatibility" list as well so that you could see if a particular drive had been tested or not.
Yes.
Though some drives on the HCL seem to be problematic, and some have even been pulled from the list. My current approach is to get WDC Red drives, which are certified to work by both WDC and Netgear.
UPDATE on the situation that I described with the WD Black 1TB drives (WD1002FAEX) drives. I have successfully built a new ReadyNAS NV+ (V1) box with 4X1TB X-RAID using these drives. I initially built the unit with 4X500GB using a model mix of WD 500GB drives. Once completed, I started swapping the 500GB drives with the WD Black 1TB drives and after the last drive was successfully added it expanded and all seems OK. I don't know if having the 500GB base made any difference but the X-RAID capacity upgrade worked like a champ.
On another note, I chose these drives because of their 5 year warranty and because of the price I paid versus ES grade drives.
