Hi all
Today I'm really kicking myself as I usually do lots of research before buying things Anyway, I currently have a Thecus N5200B with 5 x WD 1TB Caviar Greens configured in a RAID5 (all discs in array).
As my storage space is running low, I've taken delivery of a N7700 and 7 x 1.5TB WD Caviar Green drives. I bought all of this kit from Scan, and I went for the N7700 because it's the cheapest (by far) 7 bay NAS on the market - the Qnap 6 bay equivalent is almost a grand, versus £609!
On scan's website the HDD compatibility list throws out an error, and stupidly I didn't follow this up and google it. Anyway, I've just installed it and set up a new RAID5, but then I came on these forums and read about a ton of issues with 1.5TB/2TB HDDs with the N7700.
The question is, have I made a big mistake? I don't want to be in the position of having HDD failures, as I have about 6TB worth of data to put on there (all media files - DVD and BluRay rips).
I'm wondering if I should maybe look at changing the HDD to the 2TB Hitachi ones (as they are officially supported), or even change the NAS and spend loads more money looking at either the 6 or 8 bay Qnap NAS?
Secondly, I've also read that ext3 only allows a maximum of 8TB space, but I'm a little confused by this. In a RAID5, you lose some capacity anyway, but is this "lost" element included in the 8TB? If I were to put 7 x 2TB drives into the N7700, how would I maximise the space, as I've heard ZFS can be unreliable, and I don't know what XFS is?
If anyone could help it would be appreciated. I don't want to start transferring files across today if I'm on a loser to begin with....
Cheers