OMG, this is a crap!

[dealaddict]

First of all, the tech support is completely useless.  Every question I ask she has to take back and do research on the knowledge base.  WD, please train up your agents!!!

I asked the question if I can use disks with mixed sized, and the answer is no!  I am quite surprise because it is not written anywhere on the manual, and I just bought a 2TB yesterday. 

Then I ask what if I already have 4x 1TB and now need more space.  I thought I can just replace disk one by one to expand, and she told me that I have to replace all disk to 4 x 2 TB.  Then I ask if I replace all 4 disks together, how do I preserve the data?  And the answer she gives is “No, you can’t”.  I am shocked!

I think I bought a ■■■■.  I bought this because of 3 things - video and music server, RAID for reliablity, and expandability.  And it failed all three.

First, it is slow, and it choke when playing video.  Iit is not also reliable.  One of the disk got failed after 9 months.  but then I format and clean the disk, now it seems working fine.  After reading people’s comment, I lose confident in this thing.  And now, I found out it is not expandable while preserving the data.

I am new to RAID, so, does all RAID box out there design like this?  Before I bought this one, I did some research on Drobo, and it says that I can have mix disk size and replace one by one to expand.  But I read the review and some people complains about the reliablilty, so I go for this WD when it is on sale.  And I didn’t do alot of research because I trust the WD brand.  Now, I am extremely disappointed.

WD, you just destroy your brand.

[karl23]

dealaddict,

While I agree the Sharespace has some short comings your complaints about the RAID functions are simply a failure on your part to understand how RAID works. 

To clear some things up, technically you can replace one of your 1TB drives with a 2TB drive, however the extra 1TB would not be usable within the original RAID array.

A RAID array is a single logical volume (or drive) that sits on top of multiple physical hard drives. When you think about it in this way, it makes sense that you can not  expand an existing RAID array, you can only rebuild it, which would erase all data. (Eg: If you had a single hard drive, how would you expand that to hold more data? You cant.) 

I think it should have been pretty obvious that if you replace all the disks in the unit, you would need to back up the data else where and then copy it back to the device.

Lastly, RAID (not all configurations) offer reliability against drive failures, since the risk of failures (BTW, its not a matter of if a drive will fail, but when, all drives will fail eventually) is reduced by using  multiple disks.

[dealaddict]

Yes, I did some more research, all the things I have read says that I can use a bigger drive, but just the size will be determined by the smaller disk.  In my case, I have 2 x 1TB and 1 x 2TB.  So, I will have an array of 3 x 1 TB, and 1 TB is not used.  The 2TB is just $10 more expensive, so, there is no reason to get a 1 TB.  Later, if I need more space, I can buy one more 2TB.  Then if I need more space later, I can replace the 2 x 1TB with 2 x 2TB, and eventually has 4 x 2 TB.  If this is the case, that means I can gradually expand the size with no data lost.  

However, this is different from what I am told by the agent that I CANNOT use a larger disk.  And my interpretation of CANNOT is that it will results in unexpected result and the worst scenario is data lost.  And the agent told me that the only way I can expand is to replace the 4 disk at the same time!  So, this is very different from the path described above.

So, even if I have all 4 x 1TB, and if I want to upgrade, is that I can replace disk one by one and preserve the data? instead of dump 4 TB of data somewhere, take out all disks, plug in 4 new disks, then copy data from the back up?

I don’t really trust the tech support agents.  From the experience talking with them I can tell they don’t have the knowledge.  Can anyone confirm if I can have mix disk in WD, and my only only requirement is no data lost.  I am planning to put all my kids pics and videos in it, and so, those are not recoverable once lost.

[dealaddict]

I did some more research.  What I am looking for is supported by both Netgear ReadyNAS and Drobo.  Netgear call it X-RAID. It is described in the link below. 

http://www.readynas.com/?cat=54

Gee … I shouldn’t just trust the WD brand.  When I did my research, I remember seeing these, and thought this is a standard.  I should buy a Netgear, although it is more expensive, it seems to be a well developed product.  Versus this one, it is still a “developing” product, and we are beta testing for them. 

[Mark_ALPA]

Sorry you’re having problems expanding your WD ShareSpace array.  Wanted to comment because from what I’ve seen (dealing with other Arrays in Servers and SAN’s) any significant change to the array config is a Data Destructive event.  Don’t think you can fault WD for that.  I was impressed recently that you are able to reconfigure array setup (going from no stripe/Raid0 to RAID 5) without any data loss.

[dealaddict]

Actually, not really reconfig to RAID 5 without data loss.  I first copy the data somewhere else, then change to RAID 5, then copy it back.  I don’t think there is another way because I am changing the RAID mode, and I think it make sense.  I originally only have 2 x 1TB, and as a average consumer, I don’t know much about all these RAID thing.  I only know it do redundancy backup.

After learning about I need to rebuild the array, I decided to buy a 3rd disk sooner and change it to RAID 5 while my data size is still managable.  And this is the starting point of my research, and find out WD doesn’t support expanding by replacing the disks one by one like Netgear and Drobo. 

Another hassle is that WD failed to do a backup with my external HD using USB.  I had 4 external HD, and for some very strange reason, it only recognized one of them which is only 32GB.  I posted this in another thread, so, I am not going to say more, otherwise, I am afraid there will be an excuse to delete this thread based on double posting.  So, I have to backup and put back 300GB of data via a computer through the slooooow network interface.  It took like 16 hrs for one way transfer, that is 5.2 MBytes/s.  I can’t imagine if I need to deal with 3 TB of data this way, it will take 6 days for back up, then 1 day to rebuild, another 6 days to move the data back.  A total of 13 days with no access to data.