[knowlr]

After much faffing about and opening and closing of Thecus support tickets, I have observed the following:

1) Firmware version 2.00.16 works with WD20EADS 2Tb drives formatted as EXT3 at 64kb stripe.
- This means 8Tb limit so a bit of a waste.
- Drives been up for a few days now with no errors and am currently stresssing them with long copies

2) Latest firmware damages drives. Simple as that. Formatting WD20EADS with the latest firmware cauess Thecus to crash and a hard reboot is required. When it crashes it seems to lock the disk itself into continuous formatting. At this point either the heads melt into the disk or when its reset they crash into the disk permanently damaging it - forever.

3) Thecus were unable to give me any help beyond downgrading my firmware. They stated 2tb drives had been tested but could not say at what firmware version. they don't seem to have any 2tb to hand to test.

4) Be really careful - I was lucky and RMA'd a number of disks (4 out 5). Only use 2tb disks that you can RMA or you will get very poor very quickly.

I am now consdiering my overall stategy with regards to the Thecus N5200.