Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming MD600 maximum drive size

I know this has been discussed before. I just wanted to refresh the discussion and see if anyone has tried 3Tb in an MD600 yet?

According to Rick's Post, it should work. If that "little bird" was M, it would be good news - but then why not advertised the fact?

I have been running the following drives for about 3 weeks with no problems:

Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB 5400 RPM SATA III 64 MB Cache Bare/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD30EZRX

I previously had the 2Tb enterprise drives from Hitachi running, also without exception. One note, the enterprise drives ran quite a bit warmer to the touch than the WD Green drives run. I probably could have waited on the second set given Hitachi just started shipping their 4Tb drives this month.

Reg

Hi Reg,

From your signature box; it looks like you are also running 3TB drives in your TwinStore.

Are you using the same WD drives?
Did you just slot in the bare drives and let the TwinStore automatically format them?

Did you check (on the Sooloos system) that you are getting circa 3TB storage capacity from them?

Apologies for all the detailed questions, but I too am looking to upgrade my TwinStore from 2TB to 3TB. I've got some Seagate 3TBs in to experiment with but your feedback would be really useful to have before I start swapping disks around.

Regards,
Carl

Hi Carl,

I'm using the same drives (4) in both the MD600 and the TwinStore. Initially I only purchased 2 drives.�First thing I did was to drop them into the MD600. After a short format (~10 mins), the C15 showed 3Tb usable. When I went to 'Devices' it showed the MD600 as 6TB.

I then dropped a few albums on it to confirm all was in working order. I could not hear a difference in comparing the previous 2Tb Hitachis.

Since I didn't have anything to loose, I took the drives and put them into the TwinStore. The drives were recognized and the music was still there, much to my surprise. Afterwards, I swapped the order (left-right) in both storages and again, all worked.

Knowing what I know now, I probably should have waited on the second pair to purchase a 4Tb pair when they become available now that Hitachi has started shipping them.�

Reg

When I spoke to Meridian recently, the official line was still 2Tb for MD600 but they were testing other drives.

The problem is not just size & read/write speeds, there are clearly other potential issues that may affect the way the hardware in both TwinStore and MD600 deals with some drives. Heat monitoring being just one.

Meridian are careful to "only" rubber stamp drives that they have proven experience with. Understandable I guess.

No one is suggesting that MD600 won't run with bigger drives, just that, currently this is uncharted water and there have been problems with one or two drives that they've tested (Sorry, I don't know which ones).

So I guess the bottom line is .... if you try something larger it's at your own risk (currently)... but I think you know that anyway.

My own personal experience has not been great with the WD caviar green range. They seem fairly reliable but we have found the performance to be lacking, particularly when using them in other NAS units for Video as well as audio. All 7200rpm drives (Seagate and Hitachi) performed much better.

Gerry

Thanks Reg

So now we have a clearer picture.
The 3TB drives were formatted in the MD600 and then placed into a TS.

So we still do not know if 3TB drives will format in a TS.

Hi,

You are correct. Even after I received the second pair of drives, I went through the same process. �I can't confirm whether the TwinStore would format the 3Tb drives.

I'm not sure how I could force a format from the TwinStore at this point.�

Reg

We do now

I have just replaced a pair of 2TB Seagates with pair of 3TB Seagates ST33000651AS Barracuda XT 7200RPM SATA (6GB/s, 64MB Cache) in my TwinStore (RM) using the documented standard method:

- Power-down TwinStore (front press button)
- Removed old 2TB drives
- Fit new 3TB drives
- Power-up TwinStore (front press button)

After about 30 seconds (the boot time) the TwinStore started the familiar 10 second interval drive formatting beep. The beeps continued for circa 8 minutes then the TwinStore made the �fancy multi toned� format / initialising complete beep.

Once completed the TwinStore was listed as having 6TB Media fitted and the C15 reported it as have 2.953507 TB of available free storage space (With the C15�s internal storage disabled).

I have ripped a CD on to the 3TBs which as you would expect ripped and played just fine.

Next up the marathon task of restoring almost all my albums back on to it!

Regards,
Carl

PS I did consider the Seagate Constellation ES.2 ST33000650NS enterprise class drives but but they are currently twice the price of the Barracuda XT!

That's good news Carl.

With respect to restoring from my backup, I should have made a 'clean' backup to restore from.�

Over the course of multiple backups over a couple years, the backup contained many albums that I had changed. The backup doesn't suppress deletes, but it's not smart enough to know when an album has been 'improved' for more accurate metadata. I was left with more than 600 additional albums I had to comb thru.

Reg

So restoring from an incremental backup doesn't restore to the final state of the backup? Sounds odd.

Hi Reg,

If you rename an album and then backup to an existing backup you end up with two copies. I've seen this myself but I've not had any problems with the metadata not being updating.

When I perform an 'incremental' backup; ControlPC first performs an update of existing albums followed by a backup of any new one.

I'll keep my eyes open and watch out for this.

Regards,
Carl

Nic,

I found that 'deletes' were deleted just fine. Now much of my library had been stored using the iTunes paradigm (track specific). After ingesting the library, I went about albumizing as much as I could to gain the benefit of the increased metadata.

The former album remnants remained as a result.�

Reg