Buffalo Forums

   

I have two storage devices: TeraStation / 1 Terabyte and a TeraStation Live / 2 Terabyte.

 

Is it possible to change out the original drives with newly purchased drives to get a larger total. For example, can I change out the existing 500 GB drives in the TeraStation Live and replace with newly purchased 1 Terabyte drives to get a total of 4 Terabytes?

   

Sorry I should have listed my model number and firmware.

 

TeraStation HD-H1.0TGL/R5 2.16

TeraStation Live / HS-DHTGL/R5 2.14

 

It will void the warranty and support.

   

Thanks for the response Josh.

 

So are you saying it can be done but just voids warranty and support...or it will not work at all?

 

What if I replaced the drives with the same manufacturer just larger?

 

I believe my TeraStations are already out of warranty.

Technically it will work or should I say it can work.  Those devices are specific as far as the kernal is related.  The manufacturer does have any relation to the drive size or compatibility.

   

I am always a little puzzled as to why this question gets asked every few days when a simple search would provide the answer in dozens of prior posts. Here is a cut and paste from another post of a solution:

 

I recently upgraded my 1TB Terastation Live with 4 x 1.5TB Drives. There are two methods to accomplish the upgrade. Make sure to upgrade your firmware to 2.14 before you begin:

 

1) This method retains the existing data. You need to be very technically proficient to attempt this. I would highly suggest a backup of your data even though this method is intended to preserve your data.

 

These two links provide instructions. I suggest you read these instructions thoroughly and make sure you understand each step prior to attempting this:

 

http://forum.buffalo.nas-central.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=11321

 

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/Replacing_all_drives_in_a_Terastation_Live

 

2) This method is by far the easiest; but you will lose all of your existing data. This is the method that I chose since I had another Terastation Live to temporarily back up the data to. It took me less than an hour to upgrade my TS Live from 1TB raw to 6TB raw (Backup and Restore added 6-8 hours on either end). My new 6TB TS Live has been running flawlessly for a month now.

 

http://forums.buffalotech.com/buffalo/board/message?board.id=0101&message.id=1338&query.id=19937#M1338

 

Total cost for me was $268.00 for a manufacturer warranteed refurb 1TB TS Live purchased on eCost and 4 x $119.00 for the 1.5TB drives sale price from Newegg (total cost for 6TB TS Live = $744). Note that the Seagate 1.5TB drives required a firmware update prior to beginning this process. This is an issue with certain firmware versions of the Seagate drives and not relevant to this post.

 

Good luck! Backup, backup, backup

   You will see the #2 link in jfourman's post is a post I made last year.  Well, since then I have upgraded two of the TS-Live's to 6TB using the same method and they have about two months on them with no issues.

mj5, on the HD-HTGL model Terastation, you will need to replace each drive individually, restructuring the array after each swap. Then delete the raid and create a new one. That model will only support up to 500GB drives.