In late 2010, I picked up a ReadyNAS Pro and loaded it up with six 2TB drives, resulting in a usable 8TB volume using X-RAID2 and dual disk redundancy. At the time, that seemed pretty humongous. Ridiculous even. Then suddenly, it wasn’t so big… In fact, it started getting a bit tight. And just like that, it was time to upgrade. But, if I used the largest disk on the ReadyNAS hardware compatibility list—the latest 3TB models from Hitachi and Seagate—I’d only get an additional 4TB of storage.
Yes, I know… “Only” and “4TB” in the same sentence sounds silly to me too. But that’s where I’m at with storage these days. Ridiculous.
In order to get ahead a bit further on the curve of my storage demand, I went out on a limb and picked up six of the latest and greatest 4TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 drives. These are the big brothers of the Hitachi 7K3000 3TB drives (which are on the approved ReadyNAS list). With dual disk redundancy, this pushes the ReadyNAS to its current maximum filesystem size of 16TB. Perfect. As long as it all worked.
Crossing my fingers, I pulled out the old drives, bagged them, and carefully set them aside. I then installed the new drives and fired up the ReadyNAS to see what would happen.
Happily, it was totally uneventful.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.