T49: Success so far with Samsung 2TB HD204UI

[supershick]

I'm assuming the Samsung HD204UI will be compatible with the ReadyNAS Duo?

[mdgm]

It may work, but unless a disk is on the HCL it is not recommended to use it in production.

[SampleX]

My experience so far is that these drives work flawlessly.

For the record, my procedure was as follows:

Already had a 500GB drive in bay one under non-beta firmware.

I backed up the NV+ settings, and updated to T49 and rebooted.

I then put one of the two 2TB Samsung drives in slot 2 and allowed the ReadyNAS to sync the drives up.

I then removed the 500GB from slot 1, and replaced it with the remaining 2TB and allowed the ReadyNAS to sync again.

Following mdgm's advice, I was led to reboot the ReadyNAS and it automatically began resynchronising the drives in order to expand into the available capacity. I now have two functional Samsung 2TB drives in the NV+, working as expected, not throwing up any errors, and with redundancy in effect.

I'm happy.

Thanks to everyone who offered advice, and good luck to anyone else who wants to follow the lead with these seemingly excellent new drives. It is always a risk when something isn't on the supported hardware list, as we know, but in this case, for me, it has paid off so far.

Scan.co.uk keep running good deals on pairs of these drives, if you're in the UK.

[goondog]

ok so let me see if i got this.

i am running 4.1.7 T49 on my nv+.
have a 2TB hitachi and a 500gb WD off the hcl and a couple of samsung 1tb hd130sj.
i would like to add a new HD204UI drive to replace the 500gb and maybe another soon to replace one of the 1tb drives.
my nv+ is more than a couple years old so it probably needs a factory restore to do this right.

my plan is:

backup data (already done on a few random external HDDs)
backup config settings to external usb drive
remove the 500gb WD and replace it with new 4k 2TB drive
factory default reset the unit
restore the config settings
restore the data

i hope this sounds close to correct?
thanks for any help!!

[mdgm]

SOunds fine to me.

[goondog]

after reading im now even more confused!!!

do i need to do a factory reset with these drives if my NV+ is reading a block size of 16384??

was going to update from T49 to 4.1.7-T60

thanks!!

[mdgm]

after reading im now even more confused!!!

do i need to do a factory reset with these drives if my NV+ is reading a block size of 16384??

Don't confuse two different issues. If you last factory defaulted using RAIDiator 3.x, your volume would have a block size of 4096. Users with that block size will have expansion difficulties trying to expand beyond 5TB. See http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=327

A volume with a block size of 16384 means you last factory defaulted using RAIDiator 4.x, so you shouldn't have an expansion issue.

If you use 4k sector disks, without factory defaulting with 4.1.7 T48 or later in place (best to factory default on the latest beta if possible), you may have poor write performance. The partitions need to properly aligned for 4k sectors. See http://www.readynas.com/?p=3690

was going to update from T49 to 4.1.7-T60

[jbear]

I installed 4 of these in my NV+, X-RAID. Just wanted to share, all is well so far. Picked up from Newegg @ $79 per drive.

Steps I took.

1. Backed up existing data to my Hyper-V server (I happened to have enough space)
2. Upgraded to T60
3. Backed up all of my settings (everything option)
4. Powered down
5. Removed old drives (Labeled each drive with the NV+ drive bay number, just in case I need to reinsert)
6. Installed new drives
7. Powered ON, used default X-RAID, which is fine with me since I primarily stream movies to my Popcorn hours devices
8. Resync took about 12 hours
9. Restored settings
10. Rebooted NV+
11. Downloaded all logs, verified 4k block alignment was correct
12. Checked drive Smart + info on all drives, nothing unusual to report
12. Rebooted NV+ again, just to make sure it was booting cleanly
13. Copying back data now

Some data for those interested.

Device Description Status
Disk 1 SAMSUNG HD204UI 1862 GB , 31 C / 87 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 2 SAMSUNG HD204UI 1862 GB , 33 C / 91 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 3 SAMSUNG HD204UI 1862 GB , 34 C / 93 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 4 SAMSUNG HD204UI 1862 GB , 32 C / 89 F , Write-cache ON OK
Fan 1 2083 RPM OK
Temp 1 35.5 C / 95 F [Normal 0-60 C / 32-140 F] OK
UPS 1 APC Back-UPS RS 500, Battery charge: 100%, 4 minutes OK


Model: SAMSUNG HD204UI
Firmware: 1AQ10001
SMART Attribute
Raw Read Error Rate 0
Throughput Performance 0
Spin Up Time 9924
Start Stop Count 5
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Seek Time Performance 0
Power On Hours 20
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 18
G-Sense Error Rate 3
Power-Off Retract Count 0
Temperature Celsius 32
Hardware ECC Recovered 0
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
Load Retry Count 0
Load Cycle Count 3
ATA Error Count 0

Extended Attribute
Hot-add events 0
Hot-remove events 0
Lp stat events 3
Power glitches 0
Hard disk resets 0
Retries 0
Repaired sectors 0

Anything I should be looking out for as far the drive SMART+ data ?

[mdgm]

Please remove the serial number from your post. Best not to post that publicly on the forum.

[jbear]

Wanted to follow-up, I'm seeing some performance degradation after large file copies. I'm copying back about 2TB of data from a Windows 2008 Server SP2 in 500GB increments.

I'm seeing 21MB/Sec on the first copy of approx. 500GB of data, subsequent copies are only seeing 10MB/Sec. If I reboot the NV+, write speeds return to 21MB/Sec.

Not very scientific, haven't had time to do any meaningful troubleshooting. This setup had been solid for many years under 4.1.6 (and previous firmware). Netgear gigabit switch, I'm not using jumbo frames.

[darebee]

I just purchased an Ultra 6 and 4 of these Samsung drives. This is my first foray into the NAS realm so I apologize for any stupid questions I may pose. I've been following this thread and I wanted to confirm something. Since this will be a brand new purchase with no data on the drives do I need to do the steps of a factory reset after installing any of the drives? If the drives come pre-configured with 4k sectors and it is new are there any steps I need to take?

Also, I understand I will need one drive in before upgrading the firmware. I can just use the non-beta release of RAIDiator-x86 4.2.15 or must I use a newer beta? IF beta, where are these\how do I register for beta version?

Again, I apologize if any of these questions seem stupid but I am a quick learn and hope to someday add benefit to other new users. Thanks in advance for all useful information.

[mdgm]

The Ultra (x86 ReadyNAS) uses 4.2.x firmware which is different firmware to Sparc ReadyNAS, 4.1.x.

Betas for x86 ReadyNAS (e.g. Ultra) are free and available here: http://readynas.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=51. There is currently no beta but when there is it'll be in the Announcements section of that forum.

I recommend installing one disk, updating to 4.2.15 (http://www.readynas.com/RAIDiator_x86_4_2_15_Notes) then factory defaulting. You shouldn't need to do this on the Ultra (Ultra should already come with 4.2.12+ installed), but it's recommended. See Unofficial ReadyNAS Getting Started Guide

Welcome to the forum!

[darebee]

mdgm, thank you for your assistance. I have located all the instructions and am ready for the device to arrive and get things moving. While reading through the manual I noticed I can choose between X-RAID2 or Flex-RAID configuration. I plan on using mirroring only and was wondering which RAID configuration would be best to use. From the information I have read it looks like the "easy" route is to use X-RAID2. Will I lose any functionality that I might later benefit from when I learn more if I use this configuration?

[mdgm]

X-RAID2 is better. A single volume that is expandable. Have a look at X-RAID2 single-redundancy in Action

I recommend dual-redundancy (requires a minimum of four disks installed when you do the factory default).

Of course you should do regular backups of important data primarily stored on the ReadyNAS e.g. to a USB disk. See http://www.readynas.com/?p=3153