Upgrading the drives of a terastation

[Vincent Lascaux]

Hello,

I may buy a Buffalo TeraStation. BestBuy sells the HD-H0.6TGL at the very
attracting price of $400. I want a larger one though. If I then buy 4x500GB
hard drives ($200), will I be able to replace the 160GB hard drives from the
TeraStation with the 500GB ones? This would be a total cost of $1200
compared to $1550 of the TeraStation HD-H2.0TGLR5 (the 2TB one). So for $350
less, I would have 4x160GB spare drives...

Anybody knows if I can do that?

Thanks,
Vincent

 

[Ken Maltby]

Hello,

I may buy a Buffalo TeraStation. BestBuy sells the HD-H0.6TGL at the very
attracting price of $400. I want a larger one though. If I then buy
4x500GB hard drives ($200), will I be able to replace the 160GB hard
drives from the TeraStation with the 500GB ones? This would be a total
cost of $1200 compared to $1550 of the TeraStation HD-H2.0TGLR5 (the 2TB
one). So for $350 less, I would have 4x160GB spare drives...

Anybody knows if I can do that?

Thanks,
Vincent

Well you should be able to add 300GB drives to
match the largest version 1 Terastation. It might
work for the 500GB, but I doubt it.

You could put the 160GBs into USB external boxes
and plug them into the TeraStation, as well.

Luck;
Ken

 

[Alex Harrington]

Anybody knows if I can do that?

Officially Buffalo say you can't. The Terrastation stores part of its OS
on the drives and so if you replace all 4 in one go it won't be able to
boot.

You may be able to get round it by leveraging the EM mode of the
firmware (basically change all 4 drives and it will boot just enough
from ROM to get a network interface up and running). From there you do
the latest firmware upgrade (which preps partitions on the discs etc)
and then it should be up and running OK.

Perhaps the safest way might be to pull each drive, put it on a Linux
box and clone the partition table, data from the first drive etc and
then go from there?

There is an active Linkstation hacking community at linkstationwiki.net.
They have some limited info on the Terastation and might know someone
who has the definitive answer.

Cheers

Alex

 

[Vincent Lascaux]

Officially Buffalo say you can't. The Terrastation stores part of its OS

on the drives and so if you replace all 4 in one go it won't be able to
boot.

Thanks, I went for a readynas that doesn't have those bad limitations