Managing raid 5 disks in sharespace - nas server WDA4NC40000

hi guys, I have a Sharespace WDA4NC40000 for a few years. So, tonight I see one of the 4 disks has failed & the unit is running in a degraded state.

I just read the manual and understand how to fix this unit, & i see that the raid 5 should rebuild itself fine as it is only 1 of the 4 disks that fail, but obviously I need to get a new replacement disk sent to me first, so…

  1. since i have had my unit for a while i am concerned that it will be a little difficult to find an exact same disk. i don’t know if WD have stored a pile of these in order to support their customers over the long term, or do we just search around ourself?

with consideration of what i have read tonight on these forumns,

2. I see a lot of people discussing the slowness of the “wdc wd10ears” series hard disks (my current disks are 4 x 1TB WDC WD10EARS-00MVWB0). I was thinking of replacing all for of them with a faster set of disks. i backed up the configs & now i am backing up the data but before i do any swapouts, I wanted to first ask …

Q: is all the nas server management software / firmware etc going to remain in tact, or do I have to get a cd or download to reinstall the management console. if the latter then is it readily available?

also, do we have to buy these green auto rev disks to ge **bleep** to work? there is a note in the manual : quote "

Important: The WD ShareSpace enclosure is designed to support only WD Caviar® Green™ hard drive assemblies.

" end quote.

in short, I really just need a new disk I guess, plus maybe a spare for the next time this happens. I guess in the long term, we will not be able to obtain the exact same hard disks. so I am trying to understand how to manage a complete replacement of all 4 disks in the future.

many thanks in advance.

Please see my post at 

Increasing sharespace capacity from 4*1 TB 4*2 TB

I am resurrecting that thread. Before buying new drives, allow me a day or two to test a few things.

I am in the same situation whereas 2 of the 4 drives have basically crapped out. I have seen these

drives fail in regular desktops as well. They are junk and fail rather quickly in some cases I have seen.

And yes these drives are only 5400 rpm instead of the better 7200.

These drives can however still be purchased 

Western Digital WD Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

1 Like

Updated:

Please see my post at  http://community.wd.com/t5/Other-Network-Drives/Increasing-sharespace-capacity-from-4-1-TB-4-2-TB/m-p/803865#M10271

thanks so much Boujii,

i will investigate your info.

cheers.