Bad Drive on Readynas 516

ddoming73 wrote:
...The failure mode I experienced was very confusing. I had a degraded NAS that gave no expicit warning as to what the problem was. Netgear should look into why a drive with an apparently simple error can bring the NAS to its knees in perofrmance, and also bring down the error diagnostics system. maybe some improvements need to be made.

A lot of things can go wrong with drives - I had an unusual error a few months ago, where the drive suddenly failed in a way that locked up the SATA bus. Hot-inserting a new disk had no effect, because the SATA failure resulted in the driver shutting down the interface altogether.

I know this was the cause because Netgear analyzed the logs. So this is an area that they definitely keep an eye on.

Fixing all of these unusual cases is likely not possible though, unless you are willing to rewrite linux drivers and kernel code. Changing that level of code has its own risks (and bugs there would have a lot of bad consequences).