Question Lenovo PX4-400D drive size limit? testing with a fake drive?

[mikeford]

Hot deals has a thread on the Lenovo IX and PX being clearanced cheap, the catch is the NAS models debuted about 2011, with functional revisions ending before drives passed about the 4TB size. The official what drives work chart has one or two I think 5TB drives for some models, but does nothing to refute a max volume size in the manuals of 16TB for 4 bay units, and 24tb for 6 bay.

The NAS units are cheap, as in shipped to me with tax $165 for a 4 bay PX4-400D, but 4x 8TB drives would be close to $900.

Is it possible/practical to test the NAS units with smaller drives that fake being larger like they do with thumb flash drives?

 

[aigomorla]

Do you mean trying to make the HDD larger then its supposed to be?
I don't think so.
You can make a larger drive smaller, by setting partitions, but i'm sure the NAS will make its own partitions on the drive.
You might be able to do it on a SSD by flashing the wrong firmware, but that would take some serious firmware hacking.
But on a HDD if the controller does not match the drive parity, it will brick the drive, and the drive will show up as 0.
This is why HDD recovery is painful, and needs to be done right by a professional as its not just swapping this with that.

You really do not want to load the unit up with large drives tho, as i have stated, large file transfers over a 1gbe connection is painfully time consuming.
And if god forbid your doing it over wifi even, then i wish you luck rip van winkle.

 

[mikeford]

Thanks, taking that reply as a no you can't do that.

Lack of 10Gbe is just not an issue, yes for some operations will be slow, take a day etc, but its NOT time critical as long as a bi monthly mirror takes less than two weeks. Biggest typical files might be 50GB for a blueray 4k rip, and even then the rip and the playback will occur to a local drive, the NAS is just backup and shares.

Someone is already in the process of trying a unit with 4x 8TB drives, but I suspect 16TB maybe be a hard limit on volume size.