NAS Update

[billroper]

It turns out that one of the two new 2 TB Hitachi drives that I picked up at Fry's was dead-in-box. It would power up, but when you listened carefully to the drive, you'd just hear the heads clicking fruitlessly. So the drive had to be returned, which was accomplished, but not as simply as it would have been had the receipt not been lost somewhere.

However, the new drive is now installed in the NAS next to the other drive from last week's purchase and the synchronization is proceeding nicely. A note for anyone picking up one of these units (Netgear ReadyNAS NV+) and adding drives -- you'll need flat-headed drive screws to mount the drives. The round-headed screws that came with the Hitachi drives stick out too far for the trays to slide in.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I've now bought about 6 or 7 1TB or higher drives. A 1TB Hitachi is the main one I've had trouble with; I bought one and it was flaky. I have 5 Western Digitals, and one of them was flaky (both of these flaky drives worked, they were just slow or didn't recognize every time they were started). The one I think I like the best is the Samsung 1.5T. All of these are the eco (green) versions, and all run very cool, but the Samsung is the fastest even though they all run so cool you can't tell they're on from touching them.

I've had Hitachi drives fail before, too. The only drive failure I've had recently that caused me data loss was a 250GB Seagate that shipped in my last PC; at age 3 months, it just died suddenly without spewing any SMART warnings or displaying any problems; it was just suddenly totally dead.

[groblek.livejournal.com]

The ReadyNAS NV+ is a good device, and resulted in the first time I've ever been truly impressed by a company's warranty service. I bought one before the original company was bought by Netgear, so it only had a 1 year warranty rather than the 5 year one Netgear gives now, but because there was a known issue with power supplies for the old models, they fixed it out of warranty for free and they got bonus points by being the first company ever to actually call me back when I initially had to leave a message due to their computer system being down.