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Forum Discussion
Feedback regarding 104 device
I've just purchased a 104, to be honest the reason being that at least in the UK the street price is now so low that it undercuts all other 4 drive devices.
On install it correctly upgraded to the latest firmware release (6.1.4) without any problems, but the following shows the steps and problems I have now seen.
- I added a single 1.5TB drive without any problems
- I copied rather a lot of test data without any problems.
* I told the device to defrag and as far as I can tell it then locked up as 8 hours later I could not talk to it - hard reset by pulling the plug
- I then added a second 1.5TB disk so it then moved from RAID 0 to RAID 1 over time.
- I copied more test data without problems.
* I added a third 1.5 TB disk, which resulted in an additional volume being added (not what I expected under XRAID).
* The GUI told me to delete the additional volume to allow XRAID to use the disk - I did this but again I could no longer talk to the device - hard reset by pulling the plug
- System now seems to be moving from RAID 1 to RAID 5
Other comments
- The lack of device performance stats is a pain, while you may not be able to log the same stats as on the 3xx and 5xx products, some information is required.
- I should be able to turn IP6 off, at the moment it pulls in an IP6 address, even if I do not want it to.
- There seems to be no clean way to set the device to use jumbo frames, the only option seems to be to set the MTU > 1500 which is not a clean option if WAN based devices are also on the network.
- On the disk view under System/Performance/Status/Disk the window displayed to show the stats of a disk drive is too small so you can not see all the SMART information
- The apps store is a nightmare. The Netgear selection does not detail the version of the apps - so just what version of MySql, PHP, Wordpress do you offer/support?
- There seems to be no support for idle drive spindown.
On install it correctly upgraded to the latest firmware release (6.1.4) without any problems, but the following shows the steps and problems I have now seen.
- I added a single 1.5TB drive without any problems
- I copied rather a lot of test data without any problems.
* I told the device to defrag and as far as I can tell it then locked up as 8 hours later I could not talk to it - hard reset by pulling the plug
- I then added a second 1.5TB disk so it then moved from RAID 0 to RAID 1 over time.
- I copied more test data without problems.
* I added a third 1.5 TB disk, which resulted in an additional volume being added (not what I expected under XRAID).
* The GUI told me to delete the additional volume to allow XRAID to use the disk - I did this but again I could no longer talk to the device - hard reset by pulling the plug
- System now seems to be moving from RAID 1 to RAID 5
Other comments
- The lack of device performance stats is a pain, while you may not be able to log the same stats as on the 3xx and 5xx products, some information is required.
- I should be able to turn IP6 off, at the moment it pulls in an IP6 address, even if I do not want it to.
- There seems to be no clean way to set the device to use jumbo frames, the only option seems to be to set the MTU > 1500 which is not a clean option if WAN based devices are also on the network.
- On the disk view under System/Performance/Status/Disk the window displayed to show the stats of a disk drive is too small so you can not see all the SMART information
- The apps store is a nightmare. The Netgear selection does not detail the version of the apps - so just what version of MySql, PHP, Wordpress do you offer/support?
- There seems to be no support for idle drive spindown.
8 Replies
- As a follow up.
When the process of switching from a 2 disk (2x1.5TB) RAID 1 to a 3 disk (3x1.5TB) RAID 5 configuration started it reported that it would take about 12 hours. This then completed in the estimated 12 hours, but then seemed to restart the rebuild process. I'm currently 8 hours into a process that the GUI reports has another 60 hours to go!
70 hours to do a RAID rebuild is far to long, but there is no easy way to tell if another process is trying to run on the 104 at the same time and so impact the disk performance by causing disk thrashing.
As and when this is all done I get to add another disk and so will report on that in what looks like 3 days time. - Hi Rit,
Thanks for your feedback.
- The lack of device performance stats is a pain, while you may not be able to log the same stats as on the 3xx and 5xx products, some information is required.
=> Copy a big file, Write is about 40MB/s, Read is about 90MB/s, for 3xx and 5xx, both write and Read are more than 100MB/s,
I will provide the idea to manager.
- I should be able to turn IP6 off, at the moment it pulls in an IP6 address, even if I do not want it to.
=>Is it IPv6 link-local address?
- There seems to be no clean way to set the device to use jumbo frames, the only option seems to be to set the MTU > 1500 which is not a clean option if WAN based devices are also on the network.
=> We let user set MTU manually, if you want to use Jumbo frame, you may set MTU 9000.
- On the disk view under System/Performance/Status/Disk the window displayed to show the stats of a disk drive is too small so you can not see all the SMART information
=> When SMART page is display, you can move your mouse to SMART message, then you may move information up and down using mouse wheel.
- The apps store is a nightmare. The Netgear selection does not detail the version of the apps - so just what version of MySql, PHP, Wordpress do you offer/support?
=> I will create a request for the feature.
- There seems to be no support for idle drive spindown.
=> We plan to add spin down,
We didn't add this function before because of btrfs system problem.
70 hours is too long for Raid building on RN104 with 3x2TB disks, are you using RN104 now?
Please enable SSH and access NAS via SSH, then you can see process using top command. - Thanks for the quick reply
>>70 hours is too long for Raid building on RN104 with 3x2TB disks, are you using RN104 now?
>>Please enable SSH and access NAS via SSH, then you can see process using top command.
After doing this I found that with no file I/O going to the device that smbd was runing at a constant 90% load. To remove this I disabled SMB support via the GUI, and after I waited about 15s the demon dropped out of the top list. When I turned SMB back on it did not generate the same level of load (so the rebuild is now a lot faster)- this indicates that the smbd process itself was having an unknown problem.
>>When SMART page is display, you can move your mouse to SMART message, then you may move information up and down using mouse wheel.
OK I was able to do this from my desktop, but its a poor design as other brower based devices may not have easy access to such 'actions'.
>>Is it IPv6 link-local address?
The issue for me is that for both IPv4 and IPv6 it should be possible to state do not use, at the moment the options are set via a static entry or DHCP. As the device is going into an R&D LAN its key to know the exact state of such things, and to be able to make sure they do not change or get in the way of other tests.
Thanks again
Roger - The latest from my ongoing installation of my 104
The 3 disk RAID 5 process finished so I added the 4th disk to complete the build. I also started to copy files across but the 104 locked up, so the web interface stopped and SMB services were not available. The one off thing was that putty would connect but no loging prompt was shown - this shows that there was some form of life in the box as it accepted a connection on port 22. The result is I had to pull the plug.
In the GUI the following is stated
Connection could not be restored. Please
check your device.
Do not reboot the device.
Call NETGEAR technical support.
This raises two questions
1) What does NETGEAR technical support expect to do other than telling me to pull the plug? Its not like an average user can use the GUI to now enable local SSH or remote SSH.
2) Why does NETGEAR provide free support numbers in the USA and New Zealand, a local call number for Australia, BUT a high cost special rate number in the UK? - Lastest report from this deployment
All 4 disks were correctly configured as a single RAID 5 XRAID volume, so I then went to change the MTU to 9000. Once changed the 104 lost it's IP setting (which is static), so the device became uncontactable across my network.
Also the mult-press shut down via the front panel switch did not work so I (again) had to pull the plug. It is now rebuilding the lastest disk again, so another 10 hours or so to wait. - Re post from Evan
- On the disk view under System/Performance/Status/Disk the window displayed to show the stats of a disk drive is too small so you can not see all the SMART information
=> When SMART page is display, you can move your mouse to SMART message, then you may move information up and down using mouse wheel.
This may work with a mouse with a wheel but not with dell laptop using touchpad This requires an alternative solution.
Agreed. Depending on a mouse wheel being present is a horrible design.nickbatch wrote: Re post from Evan
- On the disk view under System/Performance/Status/Disk the window displayed to show the stats of a disk drive is too small so you can not see all the SMART information
=> When SMART page is display, you can move your mouse to SMART message, then you may move information up and down using mouse wheel.
This may work with a mouse with a wheel but not with dell laptop using touchpad This requires an alternative solution.- Scrolling on the Available Apps page is unusable on my Macs, barely touching the touchpad to scroll, it moves like 3-4 apps in one scroll. Seems like all the dev/QA was done by someone with a scroll wheel mouse only?
Barely touching the touchpad:
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