Last year I purchased two of these, they are 1TBx4 and after applying raid-5 to them, they basically come down to 2TB total storage. I have been using them as b2D folders for Backup Exec. Our servers have grown, and I am constantly running out of disk space, to the point where I can no longer support long-term retention.I see that segate now has the same model # (440) available in 8 and 12TB models.Does anyone know if I can just upgrade my drives to 3TB HDD's instead of buying all new NAS boxes? Purchasing four 3tb drives would certainly be cheaper than the $1500+ price tag on these new models. I've tried googling this, but come up with nothing useful. I appreciate any help! I ended up calling them and asking a lot of questions.

First off, I have to say, their phone support is excellent. I called them a few times when I first bought it, because of our unusual environment, and they've always been top-notch, helpful, and insightful. It's amazing how many vendors or service suppliers I call where the support folks don't even know the product and read off scripts. Seagate reps so far have always been extremely knowledgeable of their products and super friendly. Just had to say that.So it turns out that the unit does support up to 3TB HDD's in each slot, and through the GUI you can use a feature called 'expand' to mount and restripe each drive individually without having to reformat the whole thing.

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That's a really great feature and another reason why I'm glad I bought these NAS devices vs. Others on the market.To make a correction, I also had forgotten that I had originally got 2.68TB of usable disk space from the Raid-5 setup, but I had intentionally partitioned it off to 2TB because I was using a script to duplicate the data to offsite 2TB portable drives and didn't want to run into the issue with the backup drives being larger than the mirror. Moving up to 12TB will obviously change all of that, and I think I will just use one 12TB nas for backups, and the other 12TB nas as the offsite mirror.This is going to be fun! Can't wait for the HDD's to arrive:). Hmm, I cannot explain why, I just followed the Seagate manual, set it up on iSCSI, formatted to raid 5 (I recall Raid 1 and 5 were the only options on that unit.

10 was not an option), and the end result on both was 1.98TB.That part of the equation isn't my concern at the moment, and increased storage (5+TB per device is needed) is. With a 12TB device, I can still get at least 6TB storage on each at my current array's ratio, but I cannot seem to find any information online that states that I can or cannot replace the current 1TB drives with larger ones. I ended up calling them and asking a lot of questions. First off, I have to say, their phone support is excellent.

I called them a few times when I first bought it, because of our unusual environment, and they've always been top-notch, helpful, and insightful. It's amazing how many vendors or service suppliers I call where the support folks don't even know the product and read off scripts. Seagate reps so far have always been extremely knowledgeable of their products and super friendly.

Just had to say that.So it turns out that the unit does support up to 3TB HDD's in each slot, and through the GUI you can use a feature called 'expand' to mount and restripe each drive individually without having to reformat the whole thing. That's a really great feature and another reason why I'm glad I bought these NAS devices vs. Others on the market.To make a correction, I also had forgotten that I had originally got 2.68TB of usable disk space from the Raid-5 setup, but I had intentionally partitioned it off to 2TB because I was using a script to duplicate the data to offsite 2TB portable drives and didn't want to run into the issue with the backup drives being larger than the mirror. Moving up to 12TB will obviously change all of that, and I think I will just use one 12TB nas for backups, and the other 12TB nas as the offsite mirror.This is going to be fun!

Can't wait for the HDD's to arrive:). I wanted to update on this. I called Seagate tech support, and they were extremely helpful (they are always very helpful!!), and got a lot of insight on this. The drive is upgradable up to 3TB disks. They even have a feature called 'expand' in the storage section of the GUI that allows users to replace each HDD and it will x-fer the data to the new drive while restriping it.I also realized that I do get 2.68TB from the original 4TB after setting up the raid-5 array. My lack of memory from last year was that I partitioned it down and left the remaining space unused, simply because I was using 2TB portables to copy the data from the NAS to the external drives as a method of having weekly off-site backups of the backups, using a simple script I wrote combined with scheduled tasks to duplicate the drives.It's not the best backup solution, but it works. We used to have tapes but the drive died and it seemed pointless to use older technology at such a high price.

Anyways, hope some or any of this helps someone in the future. Parker polypak seal design handbook.