Author Topic: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support  (Read 18557 times)

mjrgroup

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Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« on: October 26, 2017, 08:45:58 AM »
I just purchased a TS5400R 4-drive TeraStation without hard drives and will be purchasing 4 hard drives to populate the NAS unit.

Looking at the specs it appears that the original unit was sold with only up to 4TB capacity drives yielding a 16TB total effective capacity.

However, I'm wondering, with the latest Buffalo firmware updates for the device, if the TS5400R will support up to 8TB hard drives.

I was able to find on the Buffalo Asia website, a list of supported hard drives with the unit and a HGST 8TB SATA drives was listed as being supported. Will the TS5400R be able to recognize 8TB hard drives and offer an effective total storage capacity of 8 x 4 = 32TB?

Link to Buffalo Asia site listing hard drives reported to be compatible with the TS5400R: http://www.buffalo-asia.com/support/compatibility/2625/

Thanks in advance

davo

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2017, 08:57:12 AM »
I've used it with 8TB disks, works fine. Both Seagate and WD.
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Texturtle

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2017, 09:03:57 AM »
You will need the bootable USB recovery image in order to get the OS onto the unit. It's available for download here: http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/terastation-5000n-series

Please take note and follow the steps in the readme carefully.

mjrgroup

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #3 on: October 26, 2017, 09:21:34 AM »
Thanks Davo and texturtle.

Texturtle, if I am able to flash the latest firmware onto the device first, or if it already has the latest firmware on it...do I still need the bootable USB recovery tool?

Texturtle

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2017, 09:42:23 AM »
The unit stores the OS on the drives, there is not really any "firmware" on the system board.

mjrgroup

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #5 on: November 09, 2017, 01:14:29 AM »
Thanks again Texturtle.

Not to change topics, but I have two other quick questions about the TS5400R unit, which I hope no one minds me asking here.

First: RAM Capacity and ECC (UDIMM and/or RDIMM etc) support?

I recently opened up the lid to the unit to clean out dust and check the condition of the fans and components and noticed the 2GB DDR3 SO-DIMM chip on the mainboard.

Does anyone know if that chip is an ECC chip? If not, would the mainboard support an unbuffered ECC DDR3 SO-DIMM chip? Regardless, what is the maximum capacity allowed?

If I have an opportunity to install a higher capacity, unbuffered ECC SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM chip, that would be absolutely awesome.

Because I'm installing four 8TB hard drives, at least in theory, higher capacity memory would most likely suit the larger array.

Second: Sector Size and Advanced Format (AF) 4kn Drives

Is there a way, when creating logical volumes/RAID partitions, to specify the sector size that the NAS/fs uses for the drives? My main issue is with 512e drives, which are actually 4kn AF drives, but logically report to the controller, a 512b sector size for compatibility reasons. When file systems interact with AF 4kn drives with 512b sector sizes, the drives introduce a performance penalty that could be avoided by forcing the use of 4kn sector sizes to begin with.

Is there a way to force the TS5400R NAS to use AF 4kn sector sizes?
« Last Edit: November 09, 2017, 03:00:15 AM by mjrgroup »

davo

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #6 on: November 09, 2017, 03:36:27 AM »
Technically speaking the RAM is not upgradable, it also voids the warranty.

Personally, I've upgraded mine from 2GB to 4GB without issues, the board is limited to 4GB AFAIK.
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Texturtle

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #7 on: November 09, 2017, 08:53:21 AM »
The system does not support ECC RAM.

As far as forcing a different sector size, I'm not sure the system can force a drive to change the way it reports itself.

garyhgaryh

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #8 on: December 18, 2017, 02:10:59 AM »
Will the TS5400R support 8T drives? I bought a unit that had 2T drives in it and put 4T drives in with success.
I bought another TS5400R and will put 6T or 8T drives in.  I believe 6T is supported, but will 8T work? Will I hit the 16T volume limit?
Gary

davo

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #9 on: December 18, 2017, 03:32:04 AM »
Will the TS5400R support 8T drives? I bought a unit that had 2T drives in it and put 4T drives in with success.
I bought another TS5400R and will put 6T or 8T drives in.  I believe 6T is supported, but will 8T work? Will I hit the 16T volume limit?
Gary

There is no 16TB volume limit on Terastations, 8TB HDDs should work fine.
PM me for TFTP / Boot Images / Recovery files  LSRecovery.exe file.
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garyhgaryh

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #10 on: December 18, 2017, 04:05:10 AM »
Will the TS5400R support 8T drives? I bought a unit that had 2T drives in it and put 4T drives in with success.
I bought another TS5400R and will put 6T or 8T drives in.  I believe 6T is supported, but will 8T work? Will I hit the 16T volume limit?
Gary

There is no 16TB volume limit on Terastations, 8TB HDDs should work fine.

Thank you Davo!

IT_Guy

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #11 on: May 30, 2018, 12:45:43 PM »
Hi,  Sorry to revive an old thread but it's very relevant to me.   


So I have a TS5400R that I want to re-drive with the largest drives with great reliability.

The drive I was considering is the Seagate Exos 7E8 8TB 512e SATA 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Enterprise Hard Drive (ST8000NM0055), but this is not listed on Buffalo's comparability list http://www.buffalo-asia.com/support/compatibility/2625/

Does anyone know if these drives would be comparable? Or am I stuck with the HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALE604 0F23668 / 0F25721 8TB 7,2K RPM SATA 6Gb/s 128MB 3.5" HDD 512E  that seem to be hard to find at a reasonable price.

I will be writing a, little changing archive of .tiff images using backup-exec to this TeraStation.

mjrgroup

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #12 on: January 05, 2019, 02:46:49 AM »
Thank you all for your responses. I have been successfully running my Terastation with a 4 drive RAID 10 array of Western Digital Red 8TB SATA drives with absolutely no problems for over a year now. Unfortunately, I am now approaching 80% usage of my total capacity and starting to think about the next steps for storage.

Incidentally, I had purchased a second TS5400R and have it sitting in my rack, it currently has no drives in it, so I'm considering populating it with even higher capacity drives.

I know that Davo noted that there is no 16TB volume limit on Terastations. Does that mean that i can use individual HDDs with capacities up to 16TB?

Is there any reason the TS5400R would not be able to support the newer 14TB SATA drives being sold by Seagate and Toshiba? Or the 12TB drives by Seagate and HGST?

Thanks in advance

Eastmarch

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #13 on: January 09, 2019, 05:24:41 PM »
Eventually that power supply might not be able to keep up. It's hard to predict, since it isn't tested. Sorry :(
**A single copy of data, even on a RAID array, is NOT a backup! Hard drive failure is not a question of IF, but WHEN! Don't take my word for it, take Google's!**

mjrgroup

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Re: Buffalo TeraStation TS5400R Hard Drive Capacity Support
« Reply #14 on: January 21, 2019, 07:42:31 PM »
I wanted to provide a short update on the amount of RAM and the Terastation's ability to accept more.

The TS5400R comes with a total of 2GB of Hynix DDR3 1333MHz 9-9-9 RAM in one SO-DIMM. (Model # is H5TQ2G83CFR-H9C https://www.skhynix.com/eolproducts.view.do?pronm=DDR3+SDRAM&srnm=H5TQ2G83CFR&rk=19&rc=computing)

I successfully replaced the SO-DIMM with a Samsung 4GB DDR3 1600MHz SO-DIMM (Model # M471B5273DH0-CK0; https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/dram/module/M471B5273DH0-CK0/)

The Samsung 4GB 1600 RAM works perfectly fine on my unit (TS5400R running 4x 8TB WD Red SATA drives in RAID 10), with the latest firmware as of 21 January 2019! I shut down the unit, installed the RAM and instantly saw my memory usage go down from 9% to ~4% at idle, so I presume it's seeing all 4GB. Incidentally, from the advanced web GUI, when I click the info drop down, it used to display the GB of RAM, but now after a recent firmware update it just shows a percentage of utilization. I guess Buffalo thought owners had no need to see the full amount of RAM the system uses? That's silly and I would like to see the total RAM available brought back.

In the future, as I experiment with newer, higher capacity (12TB+) drives in the Terastation, I'll keep this thread updated.

I will say that, whether I continue to buy Buffalo NAS appliances in the future or not, will depend on Buffalo's continued ability to accept higher capacity drives without placing limits. For example, this is why I no longer use the Linkstation. So far I am very satisfied with the Terastation TS5400R.
« Last Edit: January 21, 2019, 07:50:02 PM by mjrgroup »