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[JavaLawyer]

I read that Seagate will be releasing 3TB HDDs later this year and have concerns as to the DNS-343's capacity to support these upcoming drives.  Please read the article excerpt below:

• "Seagate has now confirmed they will be releasing a 3TB hard drive later this year. . . In modern computing systems, there is a logical block addressing (LBA) limit of 2.1TB. The LBA system can't address a capacity larger than that due to the fact that it assigns an address to each 512 byte block on the hard drive, causing it to run out of address space at 2.1TB. Seagate is using a new Long LBA format, but it requires a supporting OS."
  
  
• "According to Seagate, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and 7 will work, but XP will not. In fact, XP systems may only see 990MB of the drive. Another caveat is that these drives will not work as boot drives, just as secondary drives. Current master boot record partitions are limited to 2.1TB, and the fix would be more complicated."

Question:  From reading this, does it look like these drives will work in either standard volume or RAID configuration with the DNS-343?

[Toad]

No one has answered from DLink, but as a Linux geek, I can't see any reason why these drives couldn't be made to work in the DNS-343. Most popular Linux variants have 64-bit versions and the driver for Long LBA addressing isn't that difficult. Since the DNS-343 is basically a Linux computer, it wouldn't matter to the client systems, any more than they complain about attaching to 4.5 TB RAID arrays now.

When the 3.1TB drives are available, I can't imagine DLink not being willing to upgrade their firmware. It's money in their pocket, for a very simple firmware upgrade.

[JavaLawyer]

No one has answered from DLink, but as a Linux geek, I can't see any reason why these drives couldn't be made to work in the DNS-343. Most popular Linux variants have 64-bit versions and the driver for Long LBA addressing isn't that difficult. Since the DNS-343 is basically a Linux computer, it wouldn't matter to the client systems, any more than they complain about attaching to 4.5 TB RAID arrays now.

When the 3.1TB drives are available, I can't imagine DLink not being willing to upgrade their firmware. It's money in their pocket, for a very simple firmware upgrade.

I think the key issue you raised is the requirement for a "firmware upgrade" to make these forthcoming drives compatible.  Given the historical firmware update cycle for the DNS-343, a firmware update may take a while, and that's assuming D-Link is interested in writing an update.

[Toad]

I don't have much experience with DLink's support, although I have read some of the flame going on between disgruntled users and moderator(s). But the DNS-343, because it is a linux computer, uses a linux kernel. Off the shelf? I would assume so - it's too much trouble to develop your own.

So even if whatever kernel they have chosen doesn't now offer Long LBA, a future one will. Ubuntu, and thus Debian, already has it. I can't imagine that Red Hat, Suse, and the other major supported kernels don't as well.

Switching to the appropriate kernel is all that's needed. No custom programming. DLink has a better rep for supporting the DNS-323, and this upgrade will work there as well.

As I said, it's money in their pocket for very little work. Maybe they won't, but I'd gladly bet they will.

What I personally would like to see is a DNS-353 or a DNS-363 to make complete use of RAID 5/6.

DNS Moderators, everyone is waiting for you to say something, even if it's only, "Your comments have been noted and passed to the developers."

[JavaLawyer]

As I said, it's money in their pocket for very little work. Maybe they won't, but I'd gladly bet they will.

What I personally would like to see is a DNS-353 or a DNS-363 to make complete use of RAID 5/6.

If we're only talking software and there are no hardware constraints precluding support of these new forthcoming drives, I'm content.  As far as the next gen DNS, my preference is the addition of more than 4 HDD slots (like the 6-slot ReadyNAS).

[Toad]

That's specifically why I hypothesized a DNS-353 and/or DNS-363. given the nomenclature of the 2-drive DNS-323 and the 4-drive DNS-343, it should be easy to figure out that the DNS-353 would fully support RAID 5 and the DNS-363 would fully support RAID 6.

I'm ready to plunk down cash on either, assuming a comparable price. D-Link, are you listening?