Are NAS picky about high capacity drives?

enewmen

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Mar 6, 2005
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Hi all.

It's been my experience external hard drive enclosures are very picky about which drives go in. If the box says "Up to 1TB" tha means 2 TB drives are not recognized or all data will be lost in a few days.

I also notice I can throw any hard-drive in my PC and it just works. For huge drives, I just use GPT and all works well - even on old SATA I, 64bit XP PCs.

So what about NAS? Are they also picky about drives? Or ANY SATA drive can be read by ANY SATA controller?

Asking this because when I get a NAS soon. Then I will want to update 2TB drives with HAMR 5-6TB drives when they are relased - without needing to buy a whole new NAS (Just limited to the SATA II speeds).

This link is related, but not about NAS.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246170-32-hard-drive-size-limit

Ok thanks!
 
Solution
Just like Windows. some NAS OS bases on 32bit. which will have a limited 2TB cap.

Look for a NAS with 64bit OS, then you are fine... But some manufacture will change you license when your volume go to certain level.

I believe ( can some1 verify this for me) Sansdigital has built-in limiter in # of HDD or the size of the volume, but i'm not sure which.
Where DATOptic NAS/SAN base on FreeNAS and Openfiler they do not have limit on volume nor size

FireWire2

Distinguished
Just like Windows. some NAS OS bases on 32bit. which will have a limited 2TB cap.

Look for a NAS with 64bit OS, then you are fine... But some manufacture will change you license when your volume go to certain level.

I believe ( can some1 verify this for me) Sansdigital has built-in limiter in # of HDD or the size of the volume, but i'm not sure which.
Where DATOptic NAS/SAN base on FreeNAS and Openfiler they do not have limit on volume nor size
 
Solution

enewmen

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Mar 6, 2005
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Thanks for the posts!
The NAS I'm looking at is a Synology DS413 with a Freescale MPC8544E PowerQUICC III.
The NAS also "offically" supports up to 16TB with 4 bays. Even the older DS411 supports 16TB. Looking back in time, Synology NAS made in 2010+(ARM) and 2008+(Intel) offically support large 4TB drives now that didn't exist back then.
http://originwww.synology.com/support/hd.php?lang=enu&bays_id=3

So it seems safe if the HD & controller is SATA with 48-bit LBA and the OS supports 16TB partitions, then the NAS "could" scale much higher.

The point to all this is I don't want to buy a power hungry 12 bay NAS, then only need 4 bays when the bigger drives come out. The timing on the next hard-drive generation is bad for me. This will be for home use for large amounts of uncompressed video, do I don't need many simultaneous users on 24/7.