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[drensin]

Today I bought a DNS-343 and four brand new Seagate 1.5TB drives. Just like others have posted, I wasn't able to get them to work out of the box in the expected way in any RAID or JBOD configuration.

I also read from d-link that a new firmware will address this but its release date is as yet undetermined.

In the interim, I've found a workable solution.

Let's review a few facts:

a) in a RAID 5 configuration, the 6TB (4 *1.5TB) of disk space should yield 4.5TB of usable space.
b) the DNS-343 works with 4 1TB disks in a RAID 5 configuration.

So... Working on the assumption that the current firmware at least knows how to deal with volumes of 4TBs, I setup my box with a custom RAID 5 configuration where I assigned:

* 4096 GB to RAID 5 (that's exactly 4TB since 1TB = 1024GB)
* left the remaining 500+ GB to JBOD.

30 minutes later, my admin interface confirms the following:

HARD DRIVE INFO :

Total Drive(s):     4

Volume Name:      Volume_1
Volume Type:     RAID 5
Sync Time Remaining:     Completed
Total Hard Drive Capacity:     4029945 MB
Used Space:     24 KB
Unused Space:     4029945 MB

Volume Name:      Volume_2
Volume Type:     JBOD
Total Hard Drive Capacity:     527387 MB
Used Space:     24 KB
Unused Space:     527387 MB

As you can see, I have my expected 4.5TB of space available - I just have to put up with 500GB of it on JBOD instead of RAID 5.

Obviously, this is a stopgap until the new firmware drops - but at least it makes me feel less like I wasted the extra cash on the 1.5TB drives!

Hope this helps....

-dave :-)

[gstjean]

I had the exact same problem - this solution worked!!!!  Thanks!!!

All the advertising says "any size SATA drive" so I bought the 1.5TB drives.

I'm eagerly awaiting fix to the firmware to support the larger drives - but this solution at least gets the thing working for now.

_Gary

[profx]

Finding the transfer rate to be okay, now that you have a Raid 5 setup? Or are you finding it slower than normal (100 intead of 1000).

Currently we are testing different raid setups (while waiting for a new firmware update) to see if we can improve performance.

[mlaney]

Have not tested transfer rates but testing backing up 2 laptops via 100mps.

[fluxen]

I found this to be the solution as well. Even running the 1.2a bios I could not get past 94% in a Raid5 config using 1.5tb drives at their full capacity. I waited 4 hours for it to finish and gave up.

The box is sustaining about 15MB/sec on a gigabit connection right now, which is pretty good for a linux / soft raid box. It occasionally will spike to 20MB, but it won't sustain those rates. I bought this to replace a Buffalo Terastation, which typically couldn't sustain over about 6MB/sec, so I'm happy. A solution like this will not sustain the higher rates you see from a true hardware raid coupled with a server-level processor. I regularly see over 80MB/sec sustained on SATA Raid 5 configs like that, but that's the difference between a $6k box and a $800 box.

[profx]

flux,

Can you give me more info about your setup.  I am hoping we can increase transfer rates.

Thanks,

profx

[fluxen]

Sure, but it's nothing special. The DNS-343 has 4x1.5TB Segate 7200s. They're formatted as one RAID5 volume of 4096GB, and a JBOD of the leftovers 400 something GB. It's attached to the net via 1000tx.

The systems I'm using are as follows: There's a Windows 2008 server, Quad Core, 4gb ram, 4TB of SATA HDs on a Promise 6850ex RAID controller, RAID5. The Mac is a Macbook Pro 17" 2.5GHz, 4GB, with a 500GB internal SATA drive, running OSX 10.5.6.

The following copies were done with a 849MB Access db I had handy. The Windows data rates are taken from 2008's "more information" speedometer showing how fast a single transfer is happening. The Mac rates are taken by timing how long the transfer took, and dividing 849MB/et.

Copy from Win Server 2008 to JBOD on the DNS: 11.2MB/sec sustained
Copy from Win Server 2008 to RAID5 on the DNS: 8.5MB/sec sustained
Copy from Mac to JBOD on the DNS: 13.9MB/sec sustained
Copy from Mac to RAID5 on the DNS: 10.2MB/sec sustained

Copy from the RAID5 on the DNS to Mac: 21MB/sec sustained

Copy from Win Server 2008 to Mac: 27.4MB/sec sustained

I'll note a couple of observations. When I have a single transfer going, on Windows at least, I don't get as much throughput as I do with multiple transfers going. I can usually get 2-4 more MB/s if I'm doing say 4 different copies at once. I haven't tried that with OSX to see if it's consistent. Another thing. I can not tell you why, but over the terabytes of data I've transfer to date to the DNS, I noticed my transfers from 2008 to the DNS were very slow, and the best I could get was about 5MB/s for a single transfer. But if I had 5 transfers going, they would total something like 12MB/sec. Then today I do the little test for you above, and suddenly Windows performs great for single transfers. There's no obvious explaination for why, but I thought I'd mention it.

One more note, which you're probably aware of, but some might not be, is that transferring 1x1GB file is almost always significantly faster than transferring 1000x1MB files, so clearly your data rates will vary depending what files you're using.

flux,

Can you give me more info about your setup.  I am hoping we can increase transfer rates.

Thanks,

profx

[fluxen]

My apologies, I also should mention I've set the frame size to 8k. I tested it with 4k frames as well, and going to 8k made no real difference. The only reason I haven't changed it back was laziness. Jumbo blocks (4k and over) may really improve your throughputs, if you haven't tried it.