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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS 314 - a year of hell and now lost 10years of data!
I bought a ReadyNAS 314 when they were new in the market back in April 2013. I bought it partly because I wanted to safeguard my increasing data storage with redundancy in case of disk failure, and also because of the fancy Surveillance add-on that apparently came pre-installed on it (according to the Netgear ReadyNas website)
I bought a diskless 314, 4x Seagate ST3000DM001 HDDs (on the hardware compatibility list), and a nice Panasonic outdoor PTZ wireless camera (on the hardware compatibility list for Surveillance)
Total cost = LOTS!!!
Turns out the Surveillance add-on wasn't actually written for the new ReadyNas boxes yet, and I spent 6 months being a guinea-pig for the tech support, going from one non-working version to another, upgrading with Beta software, uninstalling it, rebooting ReadyNas, restoring the software on it, and eventually an almost working version was put on my box, just in time for me to go on holiday and come back to find we'd been broken into! Nothing recorded on the ReadyNas as the Surveillance add-on had stopped working again!!!
Anyway, through the last 6 months I have had nothing but disk errors reported by the ReadyNas by e-mail. This has been "being looked at" by support for a few months but I was told not to worry about them and they'd figure out what was reporting them or causing the errors. Either way I wasn't going to have to replace all of my drives 10 times a day like it suggested!
So I didn't!
I went away in March for a month, and whilst away amongst the bombardment of e-mails about disk errors, I received one saying "Volume is DEGRADED", nothing before that to suggest 1 disk had gone down, then another. Just that e-mail!
Stupidly I thought, oh that'll be a disk failure then and the box is going to shut down/protect itself and I'll replace the bad disk which is under warranty when I get home.
I come home to find flashing lights on the ReadyNas, I cannot log onto the ReadyNas console to see what is going on, so I contact support.
They log on to it, cannot get any logs off it as they all appear lost (with the data), and tell me that 2 of my disks died!!
Looking back over my e-mails, both disks must have died in less than a 45minutes timespan!!
Really, am I that unlucky? Can 50% of my less than a year old HDDs really die that close to each other?
Netgear of course are not going to pay to recover the data if it is even recoverable. Seagate will replace the disks under warranty but then the data is definitely gone, and a 3rd party want best part of £1000 to recover it for me!
So, shall I just throw the whole lot in the bin and NEVER buy Netgear products again? (Currently have 4x ReadyNAS rackmounts and 2x ReadyNas Pros at work, to be replaced soon as cannot risk something like this happening there!)
Shall I spend more money on an awful product and get the data recovered, replace the disks, and then maybe watch the same happen again?
Or should I jump up and down until Netgear accept that as a customer I have had a really, really bad year dealing with their unfinished/untested software, inadequacies in support, and the fact that it would appear my data was safer for the last 9 years NOT using Netgear products than it was spending over £1k on their really safe products!)
I would love to hear a response from Netgear...
I bought a diskless 314, 4x Seagate ST3000DM001 HDDs (on the hardware compatibility list), and a nice Panasonic outdoor PTZ wireless camera (on the hardware compatibility list for Surveillance)
Total cost = LOTS!!!
Turns out the Surveillance add-on wasn't actually written for the new ReadyNas boxes yet, and I spent 6 months being a guinea-pig for the tech support, going from one non-working version to another, upgrading with Beta software, uninstalling it, rebooting ReadyNas, restoring the software on it, and eventually an almost working version was put on my box, just in time for me to go on holiday and come back to find we'd been broken into! Nothing recorded on the ReadyNas as the Surveillance add-on had stopped working again!!!
Anyway, through the last 6 months I have had nothing but disk errors reported by the ReadyNas by e-mail. This has been "being looked at" by support for a few months but I was told not to worry about them and they'd figure out what was reporting them or causing the errors. Either way I wasn't going to have to replace all of my drives 10 times a day like it suggested!
So I didn't!
I went away in March for a month, and whilst away amongst the bombardment of e-mails about disk errors, I received one saying "Volume is DEGRADED", nothing before that to suggest 1 disk had gone down, then another. Just that e-mail!
Stupidly I thought, oh that'll be a disk failure then and the box is going to shut down/protect itself and I'll replace the bad disk which is under warranty when I get home.
I come home to find flashing lights on the ReadyNas, I cannot log onto the ReadyNas console to see what is going on, so I contact support.
They log on to it, cannot get any logs off it as they all appear lost (with the data), and tell me that 2 of my disks died!!
Looking back over my e-mails, both disks must have died in less than a 45minutes timespan!!
Really, am I that unlucky? Can 50% of my less than a year old HDDs really die that close to each other?
Netgear of course are not going to pay to recover the data if it is even recoverable. Seagate will replace the disks under warranty but then the data is definitely gone, and a 3rd party want best part of £1000 to recover it for me!
So, shall I just throw the whole lot in the bin and NEVER buy Netgear products again? (Currently have 4x ReadyNAS rackmounts and 2x ReadyNas Pros at work, to be replaced soon as cannot risk something like this happening there!)
Shall I spend more money on an awful product and get the data recovered, replace the disks, and then maybe watch the same happen again?
Or should I jump up and down until Netgear accept that as a customer I have had a really, really bad year dealing with their unfinished/untested software, inadequacies in support, and the fact that it would appear my data was safer for the last 9 years NOT using Netgear products than it was spending over £1k on their really safe products!)
I would love to hear a response from Netgear...
84 Replies
- The lack of repair for the bogus emails likely contributed to the situation because by letting that continue netgear taught you the messages don't matter leaving you vulnerable to a real event. I would try to get my money back based on their inability to support the product based on that incident. If they don't respond, use the BBB. You could contact your credit card company but usually after 90 days they won't help. I'm relatively happy with my older Pro 6, but I understand your position. I'd be pissed and no longer want to use it too.
Whatever you do replace this with...always take backups. Preferably to a remote location. Raid redundancy is not a substitute for backups.
steve - If you can't risk losing your data you must not store it on just the one device, no matter how good or bad. Off-site backups are essential.
- surveillance issues aside..
1) you ignored multiple email warnings about disk errors?
2) then you went away and got degraded volume (1 disk failed!)
3) then however long after, 2nd disk failed = no more data
unfortunately you (and support) should have taken the disk errors more seriously, I mean really they don't just happen for no reason.
no other nas with single redundancy could have saved your data either.
no raid is ever a back up.
backup = multiple copies of the same data on different devices and ideally different locations. - Tekno,
Sure, but not everybody is a computer geek and if the manufacturer of the box says "don't worry about that"... - I take the above replies on board, and am well aware that backups are the ultimate solution.
But having spent 9 years (potentially pushing it) and never having any of this data fail due to a disk going down. I find it incredible that when I spend thousands on a solution within a year it is all potentially lost. Strangely the JBOD that it was on before have not failed and still operate to this day!
Ergo, spend a lot = lose data. Do nothing = data would still be safe.
Yes I know that is not the correct outlook. But in reality it is the case!
I'm sure there will be plenty of "you should have made a backup" replies to this. As I have given this advice plenty of times myself.
I have no economical way of taking an offsite backup of this data. Wihtout doubling up the outlay, which looking at it would be about as much use as a chocolate fireguard anyway as there could be a disk error there and in imminent failure too!
So, without spending the thousands I did on this cr@p I probably could have got a subscription to online storage which would have rectified this problem easily if a disk had failed.
However, when you go from a "potentially lose it all" situation, to a "sold because your data is safer" situation, you don't expect to lose it all pretty damn quickly!
What strikes me is the speed that 2 disks can fail (in this case les than 45mins!)
Even if I was onsite at the time it would have skipped me as I would have been asleep as it happened at 01:07am, so really can anyone justify the expense wasted on this?
I would have been better off with a single big disk, and an online backup... I'd still have my data (even if the disk had failed), wouldn't have spent anything like as much, and wouldn't have spent a year testing an incomplete product for Netgear!
Come on Netgear - let me know your thoughts?
Doesn't seem to be a well rated product by it's users wherever you look... - tony359, you've hit the nail on the head - I can only go by what the manufacturers tell me! Right?
If not, I would have had to replace the disks a thousand times by now according to the random messages I got from the ReadyNas box about all four disks (strangely the notifications started coming immediately after an OS upgrade!)
So, spend a million squid on disks constantly and rebuild your RAID 10 times a day - or listen to support when you've explained the problem? (seems like they knew something about the cause before advising me not to worry about it)
I just want to find out who is liable for my data loss rather than being stuck in the middle with everyone blaming everyone else - all I did was try to minimise the risk of data loss and quite obviously spent a lot of money on the wrong product! - Disks can and do fail at any time, sometimes without any warning. However in this case you had plenty of warning you had disk troubles before the disks failed but chose to neither make a backup (just in case the errors indicated the disks were failing) nor replace the disks nor ask on the forums what the errors meant. Errors coming immediately after an update is not unexpected as the disks are routinely checked on boot (e.g. when doing an upgrade, but could reboot etc. the NAS for a range of reasons) and daily in the early hours of the morning, I believe. If in doubt about the health of the disks you could have checked them using e.g. SeaTools (for Seagate disks) or WD LifeGuard Diagnostics for WD disks. It is possible to check the disks in the 314 using those tools while the disks are still in the ReadyNAS 314. I've checked a SeaGate disk in a 312 before using SeaTools.
You could try cloning the disks using ddrescue or something like that onto good new disks, but it could be too late for that to work/help.
A number of ReadyNAS Users use their ReadyNAS for primary storage and e.g. Crashplan to backup the ReadyNAS to the cloud.
RAID is great, but it is a first line of defence, multiple disk failures, accidental file deletions and other problems can happen. I would recommend using RAID-6 or dual-redundancy which greatly reduces (but does not eliminate) the risk of losing data due to multiple disk failures. - Thanks mdgm, I understand what you are saying.
However when I bought this product, which was an expenditure far greater than buying a few more large disks and doing backups (seems far more economical), I wasn't aware I was signing up to spend the next year on the phone to Netgear support, and HAD to ignore their support departments advice and find some forums that I didn't know about to ask the questions on anyway.
I mean, I could have asked everyone I met in the street too, and posted on any internet forum I found that was remotely linked to a NAS box? How much time was I supposed to spend on this?
Cost of 2x 3TB disks, + another 2x 3TB disks to backup to = £300?
Now that would be just as resilient if not better than ReadyNas solution I invested in, and that's before the £500 wasted on the camera to go with an add-on that wasn't any good.
Netgear support agreed to refund me the Readynas at one point because it had clearly been mis-sold when I showed them the webpage they had written which 3 months after release was still claiming that Surveillance came as a pre-installed add-on (still hadn't been released at that point), but unfortunately I couldn't really justify that as closure because I had 7TB of data that would need taking off it (= buying some storage), and had a camera which wouldn't necessarily work with another product.
So once I'd chosen Netgear, I was stuck with it regardless as no-one would refund me the money I'd spent on disks and the camera!
Sorry if I sound a little flippant, but I am and have been for a year a VERY unhappy customer, this is just the icing on the cake! I have already invested a lot of time and money in a product that hasn't been good, not to mention the support being pretty much responsible for the position I am now in, which is out of pocket and lacking data!
Pretty much back at square one where I no longer have a need for a ReadyNas as I have nothing to store on it, and only 2 disks to put in it anyway!
So, do I waste more money on it?
I am happy to find all of these related forums and educate potential customers not to bother with such a poor product and manufacturer and buy a different product! - If NetGear's support have bad advice that's one thing, but NetGear is not responsible for products such as hard disks and cameras bought from 3rd parties.
If you didn't know about these forums you could, have asked on other forums or even found a friend of yours more knowledgeable than you about these things and asked them.
Businesses backup servers that they spend much more money on than you spent on your NAS. The backup functionality in the Dashboard is there for a reason.
If you are willing to buy a few disks you could try cloning the bad disks onto new ones e.g. Using dd_rescue. dd_rescue would try to clone as much as possible. If it can clone enough then depending how bad the situation is some data might be recoverable though if support hasn't suggested that I guess it's possible things are already too far gone in this case. - As said, disks can fail. In fact, if one fails the NAS will initiate a rebuild, which will put the other disks under stress for several hours. It's not unheard of that two disks fails close to each other because when one fails, the others are being used 100% for many hours and a flaw could arise.
You were mistaken in thinking that a RAID would cover you 100% - and this, don't get me wrong, was your fault - but it was indeed a step in the right direction: a NAS, then external backup and maybe online backup is the solution.
That said, if I receive multiple errors, I email the manufacturer and the manufacturer say "it's a software bug, please ignore the errors", then you cannot be blamed for not acting any earlier. Personally, I wouldn't have trusted the manufacturer. This is me. I know how things work and I wouldn't have believed a "ignore the errors" in the first place. I would have investigated elsewhere and tested the HDDs independently before saving my data on the NAS. But that's me. We cannot ask a normal user not to trust the manufacturer's support to be honest.
That said, I am not sure what really happened but after all this boxes are Linux boxes. No black magic behind them. They can fail. If you were unlucky enough to get a stock of bad seagate drives (not a surprise! :) ) I can see why the box sent you dozens of warning per day. It would have possibly happened with any other NAS.
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