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[opti]

Hi all, my first post here as I have just gotten a DNS-323. Now, this is what I want to do with it. I have a HTPC witch a 1.5TB drive in it, and its full. I also have a laptop or pc just about in every room of the house. Well nearly. Anyway I want to use this NAS in my network with 2 x 2TB drives in it and put all my HTPC media on it so any pc can access it.
But I am at a loss on what to get. I was going to get two WD green drives but I see a few people having issues with them. Plus I was told that using Green drives in these units makes things quite slow and waking the NAS out of hibernation with green drives is painful. Then there is the Seagate green drives Hitachi's, but I know F.a about them apart from that they are dearer.
So can anyone point me in the right direction so I don't waste a few hundred on the wrong drives please?

Thanks.

[lookingforinfo]

I purchased and returned two WD20EARS drives about 9 months ago, ultimately installing WD20EADS.  I am using them as Standard drives with Volume_2 as a backup to data on Volume_1.  The main purpose of our NAS unit is for backup.

Firm Ware 1.09 is the latest supported firmware and it does not support  the newer drives by WD and others.  Users have documented ways to make these drives work with 1.09, but that is more that I wanted to take on.  Someone posted that lower RPM drives run cooler and the decreased speed probably does not provide impact performance.  (The DNS-323 is an older, less expensive, unit with limited memory and slower CPU speed.)  If you are concerned about wakeup time, you should be able to adjust the time delay before the system goes into sleep mode.  Read the Users Guide for the Advanced settings.

With the DNS-323 you should be safe with any disk on their list of supported drives.  In my opinion, your biggest concern should be how you plan to backup the data you put on your server.  Think before you fill your NAS with all your important files and no backups.

[opti]

With the DNS-323 you should be safe with any disk on their list of supported drives.  In my opinion, your biggest concern should be how you plan to backup the data you put on your server.  Think before you fill your NAS with all your important files and no backups.

The thing is their list doesn't show many 2TB drives. Which i am after. Only the WD green drives but I'm concerned about these drive as I did read a thread somewhere about some issues a lot were having with these drive and they had to update or install firmware or something on them to see if they would fail or not. I don't know or really can't remember the specifics about this issue though...
Plus this NAS will only be for media storage, no important files on there. I have another unit for that.

[MJBURNS]

The sticky supported drive list is hopelessly out of date. Most of the drives on it are not manufactured anymore. I am using two 1TB Hitachi HDS721010CLA332 drives in a RAID 1 configuration, which are the presently manufactured version of the 1TB HDS721010CLA330 and I got them about $70 each on sale from Newegg. The HDS721010CLA330 is on the supported list, the HDS721010CLA332 is not. I did first make the mistake of buying two WD 1TB Green Drives with the Advanced Technology Formatting, but returned them. When I looked at the HDS721010CLA332, I searched on that number along with "DNS-323" and found posts of people who had successfully used the HDS721010CLA332 in their DNS-323, so I was pretty confident when I bought them that they would be fine.

Albeit, my drives are 1T drives, but as long as you stay close to something on that list and google the drives part number along with "DNS-323", you'll probably find out whether people have used it successfully.

By the way, I do use two of the WD 2TB "green" drives in an dual xenon processor (8-core) 48GB RAM workstation I have at work, and I don't have any reason to believe they are significantly less power hungry than if I'd bought someone's drives that don't have "green" in their name.

[lookingforinfo]

... I did read a thread somewhere about some issues a lot were having with these drive and they had to update or install firmware or something ...

Thanks for that information.  Guess it is time to go Google.

[opti]

Thanks for that information.  Guess it is time to go Google.

Yeah I'm trying to find the thread...Anyhow I went out and bought two 2tb Seagate Green drives and they are on and working successfully. I just have to decide whether to run JBOD, which will give me more space or RAID1 which will only give me 500GB or so extra to what I already have.

Bear in mind it for media only...

I have set it up as JBOD just so I can have a muck around with it first to find out how to use this thing. But I'm getting there.

[opti]

Just another question. I have now set it to Raid 1. But, I do loose a lot of space. But gain not a lot over what I already have.
If I stay with raid 1 for now. Can I convert the array to JBOD to gain more space but now lose the data on atleast one disk?