Replacement Drives - Legacy Netgear NAS

[techbob]

I have two 5+ year old Readynas 6 bay NAS. Max capacity is under 7TB. The drives are a mix of 1.5 & 2TB Seagates. For the last 6 months the drives have been dying of old age at an increasing rate, and I've exhausted my stock of 2TB spares. There's a Netgear Readynas approved drive list, but the only current drive I'd consider is a WD Red WD40EFRX, but it's 5400rpm so would drag the speed down for the enire NAS.

Most of the content on the NAS is archive so doesn't change, and the second NAS is powered off most of the time.

Any advice for trying drives NOT on the approved list from Netgear? I tried asking the question in the past on their forum but never got a good answer. And I don't need to be told over and over that a NAS is not backup lol...

What's the worst that can happen if I go off list? I'd like to get a 4TB 7200rpm NAS/enterprise drive.

An alternative is to pick up a single WD Easystore 8TB USB on Black Friday and sync to that, setting aside one NAS for drives and parts.

Thanks!

 

[Seagate_Surfer]

You should verify with Netgear before using any drives in their NAS enclosures, the biggest risks are 1. The drives may not have the slots/screwholes line up the same as the enclosure trays. 2. It says prominently at the top of their drive compatibility page that "WARNING: NETGEAR Support can and will deny support on devices using drives not found on the official compatibility list.", so if you run into any need for support, you might hit some trouble there. Before buying/using new drives, it may be a good idea to reach out to their support department on verifying compatibility.

If you can get them verified with Netgear first, we do offer a line of NAS drives called the IronWolf & IronWolf Pro. The standard IronWolf comes in 7200 RPM in capacities over 4TB, and 7200 RPM is the standard speed on all capacities for the IronWolf Pro.

 

[techbob]

You should verify with Netgear before using any drives in their NAS enclosures, the biggest risks are 1. The drives may not have the slots/screwholes line up the same as the enclosure trays. 2. It says prominently at the top of their drive compatibility page that "WARNING: NETGEAR Support can and will deny support on devices using drives not found on the official compatibility list.", so if you run into any need for support, you might hit some trouble there. Before buying/using new drives, it may be a good idea to reach out to their support department on verifying compatibility.

If you can get them verified with Netgear first, we do offer a line of NAS drives called the IronWolf & IronWolf Pro. The standard IronWolf comes in 7200 RPM in capacities over 4TB, and 7200 RPM is the standard speed on all capacities for the IronWolf Pro.

The NAS is no longer under warranty so support isn't an issue. The drives listed in the drive compatibility page include discontinued models - with the exception of the one drive that I mentioned. My goal is to avoid buying used or old stock drives.
Since I posted I found some old 3TB Seagates - ST3000DM001, but unfortunately also not on their list.

Edit: I found this thread - https://community.netgear.com/t5/Re...atibility-List-HCL-updates-please/td-p/876130

It appears taht the ST3000DM001 should work fine, and I have four of those currently in use that I can pull and replace with modern and higher capacity drives as needed.