To keep an interesting thread active, I am going to report on how this old NAS works with the latest Apple OS and hardware.
Just found an old HD-H0.6TGL/R5, with four 160GB drives and a horribly small array size (485GB!) and firmware version 2.80.
The network still had its old config, but I downloaded the last NAS Navigator 2 from Apple Store, run it from an old MacBook Pro unibody (Mojave OS), and had the NAS online in no time!
It took a while to check the RAID5 array, but everything worked afterwards.
The next morning the NAS was not online anymore, so I restarted NAS Navigator and decided to choose a static address instead of using DHCP. The network share was visible and speed was good enough to play an HD movie from the network share.
I tried to launch the config utility from a Mac Mini M1 (Monterey, latest update), and Rosetta allowed to run the app without faults. I could access the share as guest and started copying the content of the array to a USB 3.0 drive attached to the Mac Mini. Throughput seems to be around 3.1/3.4 MB/sec. All seem to proceed smoothly so far (fingers crossed!).
I also have a Buffalo 1U rack mount NAS to bring back to life, but first I want to try to upgrade the cheaper/older one first.
I found very very few relevant info about HD-HTGL/R5 series machines online. The serial number is not recognised, using another one I found (belonging to the 1TB version) brought me to a download page with ultra old firmware, and to FAQs pages that mostly deal with completely different hardware!
I'm still left with all my questions:
1) Which is the biggest hard disk size compatible with HD-HTGL/R5 series? Any list of factory approved drives?
2) Which is the right procedure to exchange ALL FOUR drives at once to increase array size? Init files are copied to the the HDDs, so my best guess is to backup the content, undo the array, leave disk 1 as is and exchange the other three drives, format the three disks to get the init files written to them, reboot, exchange the first disk, reboot again and finally format the last disk and build the array. Anybody out there who tried the same procedure? I have some old IDE drives, but they are all quite small... but I have many SATA to IDE adapters lying around. I still have to open the unit so I have no idea if there is enough room for such adapters, and if they would be at all compatible. If there is a chance, well... I have four identical 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives, or four almost identical 2TB drives. Before even attempting to follow this route, it would be nice to know if there is any chance it could work.
Here is the kind of adapter I have. It's red colour, but almost identical:
3) I have seen posts online where the firmware version was reported as 3.25. The only two versions I found online are either the 1.2 or the 2.6. My NAS has 2.8 version. Any link to a newer one?
4) In case of disaster I would be happy to have the TFTP utility to copy the init files to the device. Any link to the specific Windows executable? I could use that under Parallels Desktop virtualisation...
Any further advice, link, etc, etc would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance
Ciao
Paolo