Buffalo Forums
Products => Storage => : mjrgroup October 26, 2017, 08:45:58 AM
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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/ (http://www.buffalo-asia.com/support/compatibility/2625/)
Thanks in advance
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I've used it with 8TB disks, works fine. Both Seagate and WD.
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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 (http://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/terastation-5000n-series)
Please take note and follow the steps in the readme carefully.
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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?
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The unit stores the OS on the drives, there is not really any "firmware" on the system board.
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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?
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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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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.
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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
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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
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Eventually that power supply might not be able to keep up. It's hard to predict, since it isn't tested. Sorry :(
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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 (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/ (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.
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Just sharing knowledge.
I just upgraded my TS5400R with 4X 12TB drives. Seagate IronWolf Pro ST12000NE0007
I'm running them in Raid 10 without a problem.
But before i did the Raid 10, i tried Raid 0 and Raid 5 so that i could share the knowledge here.
They all worked just fine.
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Hackmaxx, thanks so much for sharing that! You confirmed what I really needed to know. I'll probaby go with either 12TB or even 14TB drives and report back here.
Did you also upgrade the onboard RAM?
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Dumb question: 4x 12tb drives in raid10 would be a ~24tb array, have you tried filling it up? My guess is that a 24tb xfs volume on a 64-bit kernel (even an older one like this) would work but I’ve never tested. I have run into a hard 16tb limit on 32bit systems (xfs and ext4) and even on 64bit systems with ext4.
Try filling it up with data and make sure you can actually write past the 16tb mark. Even on 64-bit systems the default for some filesystems is still a 32-bit address space (2^32 * 4k blocks = 16tb).
Its probably fine but you dont want to learn the hard way
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I had tested to format a 24TB Raid5 (4x 8TB)
mdadm was able to start the array, but mkfs.xfs was not able to create the filesystem
(LS-QVL Marvell 88F6282 ARM)
Hackmaxxx was able to do that.
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I wish I had taken better notes when I did that testing. I remember some in some instances mkfs did fail but I think it did succeed for some filesystems.... or maybe mkfs would fail but growing the filesystem wouldn’t throw any errors.
I do remember that mdadm had no problem creating the array but dd and other tools would fail writing aything past 16tb.
I always try to recommend testing you can write to an entire array before relying on it becuase these types of issues aren’t always aparent right away.
Over the years I’ve run into 4 or 5 independent issues that resulted in drives/arrays that reported one size but could only be partially accessed ~2 of which were related to 16tb kernel/filesystem limits.
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Joined this forum just to say thank you. been looking for a NAS that can support 8tb + drives. you guys rock.
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Hackmaxx, thanks so much for sharing that! You confirmed what I really needed to know. I'll probaby go with either 12TB or even 14TB drives and report back here.
Did you also upgrade the onboard RAM?
I did not upgrade the ram. The NAS is only used for Acronis backup storage. Users don't connect to it for file transfers.
I did check the NAS logs and do not see any spikes in CPU or memory.
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Dumb question: 4x 12tb drives in raid10 would be a ~24tb array, have you tried filling it up? My guess is that a 24tb xfs volume on a 64-bit kernel (even an older one like this) would work but I’ve never tested. I have run into a hard 16tb limit on 32bit systems (xfs and ext4) and even on 64bit systems with ext4.
Try filling it up with data and make sure you can actually write past the 16tb mark. Even on 64-bit systems the default for some filesystems is still a 32-bit address space (2^32 * 4k blocks = 16tb).
Its probably fine but you dont want to learn the hard way
I did read about the 16tb limit, but was told by tech support that there is no such limit.
I thought it was worth the gamble to buy 4x 12tb drives for $2400 cad, then it was to have to buy another NAS for over $5000 cad.
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Sorry to reopen this thread, but you guys seem to have a lot of experience upgrading these systems and I want to make use of that knowledge.
I have a TS5400R that came with 2TB drives, it is FULL and I want to upgrade. This unit is being used as an ArcServe backup storage location and is configured in RAID 5 (YEA I KNOW.....) but since it is just backup storage I am comfortable with 5 since it gives me the most amount of storage with some redundancy.
I would like to keep the current backups and have them available on the new array, is it possible to replace the drives one at a time and then expand the array after all have been upgraded to 8TB drives? Or would it just make more sense to pull the current drives place in storage and reinstall if I ever needed to get something off them?
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Hello garryschaffel,
I think your best bet would be to pull your data onto another drive then replace the drives in your NAS.
These boxes are not the fastest at rebuilding Raid arrays.
It will take a really long time for it to rebuild the array 4 times.
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Dumb question: 4x 12tb drives in raid10 would be a ~24tb array, have you tried filling it up? My guess is that a 24tb xfs volume on a 64-bit kernel (even an older one like this) would work but I’ve never tested. I have run into a hard 16tb limit on 32bit systems (xfs and ext4) and even on 64bit systems with ext4.
Try filling it up with data and make sure you can actually write past the 16tb mark. Even on 64-bit systems the default for some filesystems is still a 32-bit address space (2^32 * 4k blocks = 16tb).
Its probably fine but you dont want to learn the hard way
I did read about the 16tb limit, but was told by tech support that there is no such limit.
I thought it was worth the gamble to buy 4x 12tb drives for $2400 cad, then it was to have to buy another NAS for over $5000 cad.
Sorry for renecroing an old thread, but I couldn't find much else on this topic. I have a TS5800D with 8x3TB that's almost full. My idea is to buy 4x16tb Exos drives (https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07SPFPKF4/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=AECIPMEQNVKO2&psc=1) and then add more to the pool as I need more storage. I'm a little worried that it might not work and a little unsure if you can add drives to the pool after creating a RAID. Right now I'm in RAID 6 (with 2 drives of redundancy).
Any thoughts on this? Sorry if any of my terminology is wrong. I'm not very deep in the learning curve about NAS.
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I've got some notes about ram upgrades for the TS5000 here:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Terastation_TS5600DN#Device_Notes
I believe I read that 4GB is the max for this chipset. I seems pretty flexible regarding what DDR3 SODIMMs it will accept. I've had good luck on several devices with really cheap modules.
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Re-re-necroing this one :)
I recently acquired a used TS5400DN (came without disks), and was able to get Debian running on it by initially populating the box with 1 HDD. I am now in the process of getting 4x 16TB WD Gold drives for this. Will report back on compatibility. I will continue to use Debian.
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Let us know what happens!
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Re-re-necroing this one :)
I recently acquired a used TS5400DN (came without disks), and was able to get Debian running on it by initially populating the box with 1 HDD. I am now in the process of getting 4x 16TB WD Gold drives for this. Will report back on compatibility. I will continue to use Debian.
I'm back with an update!
The NAS is successfully using the 16TB HDDs! :D (They show up as 14.6T, of course)
Also, I upgraded the RAM using a Patriot 1600 MHz 4GB DDR3 module and that works too!
Side note: I'm now running Debian off an SSD hooked to a USB 3.0 port on the back to keep OS and data separate :) Running like butter!
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Let us know what happens!
Yep yep. Just updated the thread :)
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Nice, are you using RAID at all? I'm guessing it should handle really big volumes fine in that configuration. Just curious because the 32-bit devices run into a 16TB volume limit which should not apply as far as I know.
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Glad to see this thread has had a following with lots of responses. I've been successfully running three of these for the past few years.
Device 1 is running 4x8TB WD Red NAS drives 5400rpm in RAID 10
Devices 2 and 3 are running 4x14TB WD Red Pro NAS drives 7200rpm in RAID 10
Devices 2 and 3 are nearly at capacity so I'm finally shutting all down and moving to a giant 12-bay Buffalo Terastation 51210RH 2U device with possibly up to 16GB ECC DDR3 UDIMMs, 12x14TB enterprise grade HDDs 7200RPM and plan on running RAID 6.
I'll keep these Terastations because I've had nothing but success with them. Of course they sit in a server room with active cooling that stays below 65 degrees F year round.
Fantastic devices.
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Very happy you like them :)
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Well, her we go again.
After my initial upgrade/experiment on my TS5400R to 4x 12TB back in Jan. 2019, i can confirm that i surpassed 16TB of storage.
My current 4x 12TB system has a formatted capacity of 22287.1Gb with RAID 10, and I am at a little over 21TB used.
I am going to upgrade to 4x 20TB WD RED PRO drives in a RAID 10 again for a total of 40TB of storage.
The old 4x12TB will not be going to waste.
They are going to upgrade my Off-premise TS5400R in a RAID 0 to get me 48TB of storage.
Yes i know that a RAID 0 is not safe, but it is only there to be the secondary backup to my main RAID 10 backup.
I am also upgrading the memory of both TS5400R to 4GB.
Thank you Sid8tive for that info.
It may take a little while before i get this done, but i will post the resulting success.....or failure of this upgrade.
Hackmaxxx
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Success,
My TS5400R is running 4x 20TB drives in a Raid 10 for a total of 37TB of storage.
It was not as straight forward as i had hoped it would go.
After breaking the existing Raid (4x 12TB), I dismouted drive 4 and installed a 20TB drive
I tried to get the NAS to rediscover it but it just gave me the error.
I then used GPARTED LIVE to create a GPT partition table and installed it again. It just gave me another error.
Here is what worked.
Using GPARTED LIVE I created the GPT Partition table and copied the first 5 partions from my old 12TB drive to the new 20TB.
This left 18.17TB of unallocated space.
installed the new drive into slot 4 and did a REDISCOVER DISK.
The NAS showed the drive as unformatted.
Formatted the drive and got 18593.1GB capacity.
I did the same thing for the other 3 drives and all was good so far.
I guess from here you could create any Raid system you want, but i used Raid 10 and ended up with 37188.3GB.
The Array is functional but the Syncing is taking forever. Only 26% complete in 48 hours.
Hopefully the memory upgrade will speed it up, once it arrives.
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You can usually speed up resync by bumping up the speed limit by modifying:
/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
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You can usually speed up resync by bumping up the speed limit by modifying: /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
Do you have a "How-To" on how to get in and change this?
Thanks
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You can most likely send the relevant commands via acp_commander
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Thanks for posting your experience, Hackmaxxx!
I got the TS51210R 12-bay 3U rackmount unit up and running. It has two DDR3 DIMM slots with only one 8GB module populated, so it was easy to replace with two identical Crucial 8GB ECC modules.
The main CPU has one heatsink, which I repasted, but there are two Aquantia 10GB chips that are non-heatsinked and get quite warm.
I was able to successfully install 12x 14TB drives with no problems and am running RAID 6. The syncing does take a while but not as long as on the TS5400R units.
One note, the unit, even with the latest version version of 5.80 cannot support some of the latest SSL certificates with over 2048-bit encryption. The web interface says accepted but them the UI becomes completely unreachable and unresponsive and you have to flash firmware from the web-based tool to reset everything, even the pin holding the reset button won't fix the SSL issue. So no more SSL access to the web interface.
The only other problem is, the onboard fans do not spin fast enough and the drives run hot. I wish you could control the fan speed from the settings, because I would totally opt to run them at 100% if possible.