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[The Acer]

With the 3TB harddrives coming out (hitachi and Seagate, NOT WD) does the 1.03 or 1.04 firmware support these harddrives, can anyone confirm this with their own experence.

and theoredically speaking is there support for 4TB and bigger harddrives?

[JavaLawyer]

I posted a similar question earlier this year.  In short the answer is "no".  The current firmware does not support the advanced formatting used used for addressing in the high capacity (> 2TB) drives.

[brankwan]

Any idea when they are coming out with a new firmware? The last firmware update is 2009 and no news after that. We went thru whole of 2010 without a firmware update for Asia.
 

[JavaLawyer]

About a month ago someone at D'Link said that there was a release version of the firmware coming out at some unspecified time.  Also contributing to the delay is the assertion that D'Link's resources were tied up on the Boxee Box release (among other things).

As far as when (or if) a new firmware version is released, your guess is as good as anyone else's.

[KAIFS]

this is just great  ...  just purchased 343 and ordered four HITACHI Deskstar H3IK30003272SW (0S03208) 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive(s) from newegg to go along with...  Idea was to back up 4machines here and, storage for a graphics design projects...  Should have went to this forum first!  I guess I am back to square one in search of 8TB+ of RAID-5 NAS.

[acjohnson55]

It seems really messed up that none of this information is in the product documentation

[JavaLawyer]

It seems really messed up that none of this information is in the product documentation

Very few, if any, consumer NAS support 3TB hard drives.  Keep in mind that when most of the NAS were released over the past several years,  1TB and 1.5 TB HDDs were just being released.  3TB drives weren't even a consideration at the time.

[KAIFS]

Very few, if any, consumer NAS support 3TB hard drives.  Keep in mind that when most of the NAS were released over the past several years,  1TB and 1.5 TB HDDs were just being released.  3TB drives weren't even a consideration at the time.

I agree, however, lack of firmware (because that's all it is) of upgrades for the product is completely uncalled for and a horrible customer service.  Furthermore, there are other options (like Netgear RNDP600U) and I just do not understand why dlink surrenders marketshare...  It appears that negtgear does support their products, thus I will have to jump ship and return the 343... 

[JavaLawyer]

I agree, however, lack of firmware (because that's all it is) of upgrades for the product is completely uncalled for and a horrible customer service.  Furthermore, there are other options (like Netgear RNDP600U) and I just do not understand why dlink surrenders marketshare...  It appears that negtgear does support their products, thus I will have to jump ship and return the 343...  

I am also a fan of Netgear products, particularly the ReadyNAS line.  From my experience, the ReadyNAS product line sets a high bar for NAS performance, quality, and reliability.  With that premium price, comes a whole different tier of support and upgrades.   Additionally, Netgear historically provides an abundance of post consumer support in their forums.

[cholette]

I realize this is an old thread, but i ended up here while googling for 3tb support

I used to have 4x 1.5TB in my DNS-343 until one died. I decided to replace it with a 3TB drive without looking up 1st if it was supported. The NAS sees that it's a "3000mb" WD drive, but i was disappointed when i saw, after waiting about 30mins for the formatting, that it only created a 2TB volume

I took the drive out and went eSATA into my windows desktop. Obviously i couldn't do much...i tried my old version of PQ Magic (it only saw it as a 765gb drive). I finally remembered that MBR disks don't support +2TB partitions. So i looked up how to convert to GPT and found this page: http://bramp.net/blog/2010/08/converting-mbr-to-gpt-without-deleting-your-partitions/

I only did:
gptgen \\.\\physicaldrive2    (my drive was physicaldrive2)
gptgen -w \\.\\physicaldrive2

That converted it to GPT. I then used EASEUS to delete the 2TB EXT3 partition the NAS created, and recreated one with the full space that was available.

I put the drive back in the NAS, booted it. When i logged on the web gui the 1st time, it asked me if i wanted to format the newly inserted drive. I hit skip and i now see a 2.66TB partition when i browse the NAS from my windows7 desktop

[JavaLawyer]

It's great that you seem to have found a workaround. Please post back in a month or so and report back on the stability of this approach. I'm always a bit wary when it comes to performing ad hoc changes at the HDD level, especially when data integrity is involved. If this approach provides long term stability, then kudos!

[cholette]

i'm also a bit worried about that.

So since I performed that work around, i started copying data from my other drives in the NAS to this new one. It took a very long time obviously to copy the content of my first full 1.5tb drive and the copy eventually failed (it was showing around 10mb/s)
I found some folders with what looks like corrupted files. At one point, it was saying i had 4.39EB of data (yes, EB, not TB or even PB). The size of some files was reported wrong and i couldnt write to the drive anymore. Windows was showing my network drive was 50% full but i couldn't do anything.

Now i'm trying to run a scandisk from the NAS' web interface. I'm wondering at this point if what i did has anything to do with this, or if it's a coincidence and something just happened during the copy. I don't really want to spend too much time on this as i'm really just looking into having a backup of my data

I might just take the drive out and look into buying a different NAS. It's sad i can't get a firmware update from dlink to support GPT and >2TB disks. I love this thing. it's been running 24/7 for years

[JavaLawyer]

I might just take the drive out and look into buying a different NAS. It's sad i can't get a firmware update from dlink to support GPT and >2TB disks. I love this thing. it's been running 24/7 for years

I can empathize with you, as I have two DNS-343s with eight 2TB HDDs running for 3+ years 24/7 with no issues to speak of. I recently purchased the new DNS-345 -- the price of this new NAS has dropped considerably over the past 6 months.

The DNS-345 supports HDDs > 3TB and has a wealth of new functionality. Throughput is much higher. My write speed (PC > DNS-345) is 54 MB/s, whereas my DNS-343s max out at ~9.5 MB/s. I'm still playing with the unit, testing the HDD configurations and data integrity before storing live data, but all looks good so far.

[JavaLawyer]

Throughput aside, from a data integrity perspective I would have preferred raising the storage capacity of the proven DNS-343 through an official firmware update rather than purchasing new hardware with no long term track record.

[cholette]

I successfully copied all of my stuff to this new 3TB drive via eSATA so i know the drive is fine.
This was either a coincidence, or it really didn't like what i did with the partition table.

I will most likely buy smaller drive and keep the 343 as a backup, like i'm doing  with my older 323 right now.
I'll look into the 345 thanks.

All in all...for the price i paid for the 343, i don't think i can complain. Compared to all the other 4bay NAS devices.