Are 3TB drives finally working for Readynas4200?

[GibsonLP]

Hello,
2 days ago we got our brand new Readynas 4200 with 5 3TB drives.
Our dealer explicitly promised us that this model supports >2TB drives on all 12 channels. He was actually quite annoyed with me when I pushed for more information and explained that as far as I know all 3GBPs LSI controllers do not support >2TB...
Needless to say, upon configuration I noticed that the 5th drives shows only 2TB... This unit is going back on monday. Very disappointing...
Enough bitching and back to the question:
Seeing this unit available officially from netgear's website - is there a way to get more information about it? when will it be available? will all other 4200 models share the same hardware upgrade to enable large drives support?

Thanks.

[cydeweyz]

You didn't say what firmware it is running...

[GibsonLP]

It is offline, I will check tomorrow but I don't think it is a firmware related issue, raidar simply showed 3TB for channels 1-4 and 2TB for channel 5 on the gui itself (mouse over the disk).

[TeknoJnky]

if it showed 3tb on the first 4, then it would not be a firmware issue.

[beisser1]

the readynas4200v1 will never work with 3tb drives on channels 5-12. its not a firmware-issue but a hardware-issue with the LSI controller used in the 4200v1.

[TeknoJnky]

I guess the question becomes;

How exactly do you tell the difference between a 4200v1 and 4200v2 ?

[Jedi_Knight]

Welcome Screen.. 🙂 I can't guess how many RN4200v1 out there..

[mdgm-ntgr]

It should show in Frontview, the logs zip file and I guess probably RAIDar as well which one you get.

Probably a good idea to wait a little while (maybe a few months or so) and buy from a reseller who ships direct from the distributor.

[TeknoJnky]

How would you tell inventory-wise, ie without opening a box.

[claykin]

Honestly, for the price of these NAS boxes, Netgear should denote significant changes in a model # change or suffix change. Something. Same thing happened recently with the Pro2 that began shipping with Enterprise disks at some later date.

I love the Readynas products, but this shows poor support for Enterprise/Corporate users who have specific demands.

[mdgm-ntgr]

Maybe the models supporting 3TB drives are just the 36TB model initially with others to follow later?

[TeknoJnky]

in products of this price range, there should be absolutely ZERO confusion on what supports what.

instead of 4200v2, there should have been a 4300.

it really is that simple, having multiple products with differing capabilities of the same name (regardless of v#) is bad for business and for customers.

[mdgm-ntgr]

The naming of the rack mounts indicates some things about the model typically 4200 (4th gen speed wise, 2 as in 2RU). So I think they'd go 5200 rather than 4300). The 1500 seems to be a bit of an exception with its naming.

I agree I'd like it if they changed the name. If I was looking for one, I certainly wouldn't want to buy one with the old hardware, but I wouldn't want to have to get 3TB drives to start with either.

Edit: Just had a look and it seems the 2100v2 is still advertised as "-100". In the case of the 2100, there's now a 64-bit CPU in it rather than the 32-bit one it had before.

[GibsonLP]

Just came back home from blackhat and defcon, I did everything remote so it was quite a bitch (it got stuck at 88% and apparently the enterprise WD disk we had there (the same for all 5) died upon buildup...).
Anyways - I checked it and it runs the latest firmware (although afaik it should not matter for the drives detection, especially if the 1st 4 are seen as 3TB...), the model (in frontview) says 4200v1...