Terastation III Maximum Drive Sizes

[Exrace]

I was hoping someone would have had a nice matrix of tested drive sizes for the Terastation III but I searched the forum and came up short.

I have a TS-RIX8.0 TL/R5 with 2TB drives.
I found in this family of Terastations III that 3TB drives was an option (TS-RIX12.0TL/R5).
So looking like 3TB are supported in this model.

Has anyone has tried to use 4TB or larger drives in this model?

[Exrace]

I noticed someone mentioned in the forums these large format drives have firmware that emulates smaller sector size for compatibility.
If the drive supports this will any drive emulating the smaller sector size work in the  Terastation III?

Would be helpful to know the controller and driver used in these models.

[davo]

3TB disks should work without issue.

[Exrace]

Do you think the 4TB drives would work or is that over the limit the controller can handle for Terastation III?

[Exrace]

A 4tb ST4000VN000 was recognized with no issues.
The large drive support looks to function correctly in this older terastation!

[Exrace]

A ST6000VN0021 6TB works with no issues.

[Eastmarch]

Sector size is only an issue on legacy WSS units. TS-RX did ship with 4TB drives for a very short time before it EoL'd.

Nice to know the 6TB works, but it's not especially simple to replace all the drives, as the OS needs to be put on the new drives, an unsupported process that can be tricky.

[Exrace]

Posting to update my findings with using 6TB drives in a Terastation III with the latest firmware (1.66).

(4) ST6000 drives in Raid 5 config.
16.5Tb useable.
Takes a while to raid scan but working with no issues.

[1000001101000]

Have you tried filling it up completely?

There is a 16TB volume limit that should apply to these devices but it doesn't manifest until you actually try to write to a block past 16TB (in my experience on an LS-QVL at least).

[TheBaron]

Has anybody tested any drives above 6TB on the Terastation 3? or have we concluded that 16TB is the absolute max that is usable on this NAS.   

ie. 4x 6TB HDD drives configured in RAID 5 giving a usable volume of just over 16TB.

I own four Terastation III and four Terastation II whereby I'd like to gradually upgrade the capacity of each NAS to its absolute max size as I have a lot of data.

Can anyone advise? Many thanks

[1000001101000]

16TB (TiB?) is the limit for this and (almost) all 32-bit arm devices. Basically that works out to 2^32*4K blocks. If I remember correctly the block size is limited to the memory page size which is limited to 4K for some reason or other. The version of the filesystems/tools included in this era of firmware also tend to be limited to 32-bit as well.

This is separate from the 2TB MBR limit, though similar since that limit is 2^32 * 512 byte sectors. Some older sata controllers and usb->sata adapters also had 2TB limits but I haven’t seen that for a very long time.

I suspect if you try to write to the RAID5 past the 16TB mark you will run into IO errors. I did exactly that on an LS-QVL with 2x4tb and 2x6tb in a linear array (I did weird stuff back then). It was not fun, the volume formatted and operated normally until several months into using it transfers would mysteriously fail.

Please be careful.

[TheBaron]

Many thanks for the info, most helpful.

I'll give it a go in the next 3 months with 4x 6TB WD drives on the first of my four Buffalo Terastation III NAS units and I'll report back to this forum on how it goes and list any recommendations and lessons learn't for other users.

___________

Has anyone upgraded the Buffalo Terastation II in the same way?

I've done some research and found the only resolution is people have successfully upgraded this NAS with 4x 3TB drives giving a total RAW capacity of 12TB before configuring it into a RAID 5 volume. People seem to suggest you can go above 3TB per drive, with more recent drives, but i've not really found anyone I have confidence in yet!

[1000001101000]

I don’t think the Terastation II’s bootloader can natively boot anything other than MBR partition tables which have a 2TB size limit.

It is possible to work around that limit using a hybrid GPT/MBR partition table. I did it once with a 6tb drive on mine while testing a process for doing so with a Debian https://github.com/1000001101000/Debian_on_Buffalo/wiki/Alternate-install-method-via-debootstrap-script

It might be possible to do something similar with the stock firmware though it would involve a lot of manual work and the firmware may not handle the resulting arrays properly.

[TheBaron]

...mmmmh, some of that has gone over my head and is bouncing around the walls of the room next door. Not all of the detail though, I got some of it. 😂

It sounds like I'd be far better off repopulating my 4x Terastation II's with 2TB drives giving me a raw capacity of 8TB per NAS, and subsequent ~6TB in RAID5 per NAS. It's either that, or I go the whole hog and invest in a new and more modern NAS that can handle much larger drives (8+ drive bays etc). I am more likely going for both type of systems and using one type of system as a critical data backup and the other as my NAS system for day-to-day working files.

If I do go for buying a number of 2TB drives for the Terastation II's  anybody got any recommendations?

Many thanks for your help and advice

[1000001101000]

It always depends what your goals are, what your budget is, and what is available to you. I think the last time I bought 2TB drives was in 2010.