NAS fun-n-games

We have a couple of ReadyNAS 1100 units in our data center. They have been very reliable and easy to support for the 3 or so years we have had them.

The only issue is that we have used up all of the disk space. Part of the appeal of the ReadyNAS products is that they use something called XRAID which allows you to expand the space by adding new drives. The process is simple: you add larger hard drives one at a time allowing the RAID to resync each time and once you have replaced all of the drives you have a bunch of new capacity. Pretty slick.

I checked the hardware compatibility list and bought some 2TB WD WD20EADS drives on the list to replace the 1TB drives we have. However, I should have read the fine print. There is a flaw with those drives that causes them to eat themselves pretty quickly because they put the heads to sleep to save energy (green, right?) every 8 seconds but then have to wake immediately back up to do work. This results in high load cycle counts and early disk death.

There is a fix: you can use a little tool called WDIDLE3 to set idle time to a longer interval. I went through the process on the WD20EADS using an old system I had and it seems to have worked for all of the drives. Now, I just need to figure out a way to test them without putting them back in the NAS...