WD Sharespace 2TB upgrade to 8TB (EADS vs. EARS)

Community Archives WD ShareSpace
1

So I can not find any additional 1 or 2TB EADS drives anywhere to expand my WD Sharespace to a large capacity (currently 2 x 1TB EADS). I see that from many forum posts that I can not mix drives (ie EADS and EARS in the same sharespace box) so I plan on purchasing 4 2TB WD20EARS drives and placing them into my sharespace. This shoudl give me enough space for the next milenium. 

Has anyone done this before and did it work?

From what others have posted it seems to work but there is not straight yes or no answer.

2

Hello,

Same issue here, same question.

Note that 10 days ago, I asked WD support a list of all compatible hard disks that could fit into the ShareSpace WDA4NC20000. No, answer so far (reading the forums, I noticed I am not the only one not getting answers…).

I also contacted the shop where I bought the ShareSpace two years ago: they laughed suggest I buy something else :cry:

I’ll probably go for Synology. I may run into other issues, but at least they provide an updated list of compatible hard drives for their NAS.

Good luck.

3

Similar thoughts here. My retailer struggled to know the differance between the two types of drive.

Was thinking about cutting my losses and moving to a netgear NAS or similar. At least you are not limited to WD drives then.

4

I bought a 2TB Sharespace with 2 EADS drives and upgraded it easily with 2 EARS drives.

Has been working since January without a glitch.

5

Thanks for the reply Matt. I assume that you replaced the two EADS drives with the EARS drives or did you just add them to the two spare rails in the box?

6

Thought I would share this:

part of my message I sent to WD support:

…

However, it seems I can’t find anymore WD10EADS drives.

Therefore, could you send me a list of all compatible hard disks

that could fit into the ShareSpace WDA4NC20000 (EARS ? EARX ? other ?)

Thank you

…

Here, the answer I received from WD support:

(I only hide the name of the person who replied and mine: WDsupport and ME)

Dear Mr. ‘ME’,
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support. My name is ‘WDsupport’.
We apologize for the late reply to your message.
The best drives for a Nas or raid setting are the RE drives.
These are that more expensive drives.
Model nummer WD1003FBYX.
Or modelnumber WD1000FYYG 
For the a bit lower price:
WD1001FALS 
WD10EARS 
If you have any further questions, please reply to this email and we will be happy to assist you further. 
Sincerely,
‘WDsupport’

So, as opposed to anything I read in this (and other) forum, it seems the WD Sharespace 2TB can accept:

  • WD10EARS (in my country the WD1001FALS is unavailable …) OR
  • WD1003FBYX (7,200 RPM, Buffer Size 64 MB, SAS 3 Gb/s. WD RE line :dizzy_face:) OR

- WD1000FYYG (7,200 RPM, Buffer Size 32 MB. WD RE line :dizzy_face:, SAS 6 Gb/s :dizzy_face:)

Too good to be true ? Is this really the answer for the WDA4NC20000 product ?

Well, unfortunately, WD support already gave me wrong answers in the past. So to be completely honest, I must say that I do not trust this reply. If anyone is willing to test and share, fine. I personnaly won’t. I have several other WD products, which I am very happy with (meaning I did not need any support for these yet), but I will stop using  WDA4NC20000 and any network storage product from WD.

Regards.

7

Well just an update on what I have done.

I went to my local IT shop and purchased four new WD20EARX drives for my sharespace. Apparently the WD20EARS drives are superseded. The IT guys I spoke to were not surprised that the EADS and EARS did not work together as they do not have the same cache (32mb vs. 64mb).

I have loaded these new drives into the box and formatted them (took 3 days) and it is now working fine in Raid 5 setup.

I now have converted the 2TB share space into an 8TB Sharespace. It was costly but I think worthwhile as I will not need more data space for a while.

As a note I now have two spare WD10EADS to find something to do with.

8

Hi

Actually, I just added two EARS drives to my two existing EADS drives.

After that I performed a factory reset of the box resulting in a 16 hour reformatting / raid-5 building process.

Worked fine and without any problems ever since.

Matt