NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Disk test will not stop.
I have a ReadyNas 516 with 6 8TB drives. I started getting errors on the Raid-5 volume with one of the drives started having ATA errors...
Disk: Detected increasing reallocated sector count: [33360] on disk 6 (Internal)
I ended up replacing the drive upon replacing the drive it went into a resync and when finished it started a disk test.
It has been in disk test mode now for more than a month and the volume is still read only. I have tried to delete files off of this volume to have more space and the delete appears to work only to do a refresh on the shares page to see that they are still there.
I found other help here on how to cancel this "Disk Test" but I have no cancel feature as stated in other posts and I have tried to turn off the ReadyNas multiple times to stop the "Disk Test".
But upon reboot, the disk test start up automatically and has been running now as I have said more than a month. I have backed up most of the data. But reading data off of this volume can take upto 10 minutes for just 1 GB file to transfer.
Does anyone know how to shut this disk test off?
Oh... there is ZERO help from Netgear.
9 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
And no... Netgear didn't reach out to me to tell me that they have exited their NAS business as I purchased all 3 516's off of eBay for less than $200 each, spread out over the last 7 years.
Netgear didn't reach out to me to tell me that they have exited their NAS business
They didn't reach out to anyone - they just silently dropped out of the business. The last platforms were released back in 2017, and all platforms are end-of-life.
This would be 100% excellent advice if I was using this for commercial purposes... But I'm not. It is for backup purposes and sitting on a shelf in a closet in my basement.
This would be 100% excellent advice if I was using this for commercial purposes... But I'm not. It is for backup purposes and sitting on a shelf in a closet in my basement.
Not sure what advice you mean. FWIW, I am also a home user, and my main NAS also lives in my basement.
Backup is a write-heavy application, since backups are rarely read. So not well suited to SMR drives, which are optimized for archival (read-mostly) use.. I'd get Ironwolf or WD Red Plus in the future.
I've never had a disk test take two months - they generally complete within 24 hours on my system. Two months suggests a problem with one of the drives, so I recommend downloading the full log zip. The summary information on the log pages doesn't give enough detail on problems with disk drives.
Seagate disks model ST8000DM004-2CX188. This is the only ReadyNas that has 8TB drives. The 2 others have 16TB and 20TB drives, all Seagate.
The 2 other 516 ReadyNAS boxes and I have tried disk tests in the past and it seems like they have taken less than a day to complete.
This disk test started all on its own after a drive replacement. Other 516's I was doing disk tests on had previous versions of the software. With no more support from Netgear and no more updates to ReadyNas software, I will never do another disk test again if this one took 2 months to complete.
It seems like Netgear is wanting everyone to trash their ReadyNas boxes and buy new ones. If this is the case, I'll find another hardware company.
Seagate disks model ST8000DM004-2CX188
These are SMR drives, so not a great choice for NAS. That might factor into the test time. Sustained write performance of SMR drives is very slow (and requires a lot of disk activity). That is because writing to track X trashes track X+1. So the drive has to "ripple"
- Read track X+1
- Write Track X
- Read Track X+2
- Write Track X+1
- ...
until the "ripple" reaches the end of the SMR zone. The manufacturers do increase cache and re-order writes to minimize the impact of SMR - but anything that does much writes (including resyncing) will be much slower than a conventional (CMR) drive.
Generally I recommend NAS-purposed (for example, Ironwolf or WD Red Plus) drives or enterprise-class drives for NAS. Desktop-class mechanical drive models are shifting to SMR, as primary PC drives have transitioned to NVMe
I will never do another disk test again if this one took 2 months to complete.
The test is done with a standard linux tool (smartctl). Your particular symptom is more likely to be one of the drives and not the NAS. The long time indicates that at least one drive was struggling.
So not running the test is not the best response.
It seems like Netgear is wanting everyone to trash their ReadyNas boxes and buy new ones.
Hopefully you know that Netgear has exited their NAS business. All ReadyNAS products are end-of-life.
The disk test finished this morning July 14th, 2025 at 3:18am. The NAS device seems back to normal now. There is no report for the Disk test if there were error or anything else with the volume or disks.
I suggest downloading the full log zip, and looking in there for errors. This sounds like something is in fact wrong, While it could be disk 6, there could be something else going on.
What model disks are you using?
I'm not going to try a disk test again.... Ever.
FWIW, I run them every 4 months on my own NAS. (My approach is to scheduled one maintenance task per month for each volume, so I cycle through all the tests 3x a year.)
I started this disk test on May 17th, 2025. It would not stop as rebooting the NAS device only started the disk test back up.
The disk test finished this morning July 14th, 2025 at 3:18am. The NAS device seems back to normal now. There is no report for the Disk test if there were error or anything else with the volume or disks.
I'm not going to try a disk test again.... Ever.
I'm also replacing Disk 6 in the raid array as I've already had one reallocated error since the disk test finished early this morning.
Thanks for responding.
But upon reboot, the disk test start up automatically
That is odd, my recollection is that rebooting would cancel the test.
But reading data off of this volume can take upto 10 minutes for just 1 GB file to transfer.
Read-only status and the slow transfer speed suggests something else is wrong. I suggest that you download the full log zip from the log page and look there.
If you can't decipher the logs, I can take a look - put the full zip into cloud storage, and send me a download link in a PM (private message). Make sure the permissions allow anyone with the link to download. (Send the PM using the envelope icon in the upper right of the forum page).
I probably won't respond until early next week - I am on vacation at the moment.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
