Thanks for this.
Yes, the two drives are exactly the same model:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
1TB
ST31000340AS
P/N 9Bx158-303
The only difference is the serial numbers between the two drives and that they have different firmware versions.
Odd then that one appears to be around 3GB larger.
Thanks,
Phill.
It's not at all unusual.
In the early days of magnetic disks, the manufacturer would ship the disk with a defect list that outlined the defective blocks found during initialization and we would have to manually enter those bad blocks into a table to prevent the system from writing to them. You could have a 5MB disk (stop laughing, my first disk was a 14" monster with a 5MB per platter capacity, one platter fixed, the other removable) with half a dozen or so bad blocks whilst another might have more or less. Each block had a capacity of 512 bytes, so you'd lose a few KB or so - no big deal - but it was rare to find two disks with exactly the same capacity.
Modern disks have much greater capacities and it is now the custom for the manufacturer to reserve an area into which bad blocks are 'remapped', you no longer get a defect list, but the disk is smart enough to know that instead of writing to block that has been marked bad, it should instead write that data into another block in the reserved area.
It is of course entirely possible for the disk to also have a few GB
less, and had this happened to you, your DNS-323 would have told you that the disk was too small to be used as a replacement - I've seen this happen, not with my DNS-323, but with an IBM server.