Nas drives / 3TB ? advice

[kaelell]

Hi all,

just looking for some advice on NAS drives.
I am looking to purchase this enclosure soon (Synology diskstation)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-Di...HMZ4/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1356441476&sr=8-4

and then buy a 3TB seagate drive
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-720...X0UE/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1356441476&sr=8-9

adding a further 3TB a couple of months down the line.


the question is regarding the 3TB drive, in the reviews section some people are discussing that the drive only comes as 2.2GB and you need to convert to "GPT" for it to work as 3TB. just wondering if someone could shed some more light on this and whether or not I would still be able to use Timemachine or CCC with the drive?


Also, when I eventualy purchasse a second hard disk I want it to work in a raid 1 configuration and keep a copy of the original disk, is this something I can do later or would I have to wipe both drives and start from scratch in Raid 1 configuration?

thanks in advance.

 

[brightjc@me.com]

3TB Discs

I've just bought an Icybox enclosure (4 bay) and put two 3TB discs into it as a RAID 0 (Striped) configuration. My hard drives are similar to yours, they are 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives. I needed to reformat the drives to get them to show up as 3TB instead of 2.2TB. I think they show up as 2.2TB when they're formatted as MS-FAT (for windows). Once I'd formatted the drives as Mac OS X (Journaled) they showed up as 6TB (as they are Striped they combine into a big volume).
I bought these drives for use as Time Machine Back-Up drives which (it appears) that they're perfect for. You should have no problems using your disc as a Time Machine back-up drive. I do not use CCC so cannot advise on this.

As for your second question, I think that when you create a RAID set it formats the disc the form the set so yes you would have to start again.

 

[kaelell]

Many thanks m8 !

 

[roidy]

An Icybox isn't the same thing as a real NAS box like the DS213. An Icybox is just an external hard drive enclosure, where as a NAS is a self contained computer running linux, this means that with an Icybox you can choose how to format the drives, ie FAT NTFS etc but with a NAS you're stuck with whatever file system the NAS box uses.

Looking at the Synology website for the model you're interested in shows that it supports drives upto 4TB in size, so you shouldn't have any problems.

I don't know about the DS213, but generally creating a raid array is a destructive process, so if you put data on the drive and then try to create a raid later it may wipe the data in order to do it. You'd have to read the DS213's documentation to check for sure.