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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
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- Just looked through some of my many e-mails to and from Netgear, here is an excerpt from 6th March (8 days before I went abroad for a month):
Update from NETGEAR:
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the logs the other day.
I looked through the entire case here and I must admit that it is some endeavor you been involved in. Really sorry about all these troubles!
Anyhow, the disk errors are quite perplexing. They rapidly started to grow, but it would be very unlikely that it would happen pretty much simultaneously on 3 separate disks. I do suspect that something else at work here.
I will work with Nadeem on this asap and we will consult Level 3 straight away"
However I didn't get a response before it all went horribly wrong! :( - After all, they didn't tell you not to worry about the errors then!
- Not on that specific reply no - Far too many of them to post all and I can't imagine anyone here would want to waste their life reading them all either.
I was trying to point out that Netgear also thought the disk errors were not being reported correctly. As it is unlikely that 3 disks would suddenly experience the same errors suddenly.
Anyway... I'll call support again today. - Ok, got 2 new identical disks today.
Booted with Knoppix RescueCD
Connected disk 2 from the ReadyNas and a new disk to machine
Ran ddrrescue command:
ddrescue -r 1 -a 10485760 -b 4096 -d -f -K 65536 /dev/sdd /dev/sde btrfslog.txt
All was going well, or at least I think it was - I have no idea how this should go successfully.
Phase 1 (Copying), ended something like this:
rescued 5GB, errsize 380GB, errors 320...
Phase 2 (Trimming), started but then the disk started making that horrible clunking noise continuously, after about 20mins of numbers and the disk position moving around (I thought it was making progress) it did this:
rescued 16GB, errsize 2984GB, errors 38455...
When the last succesful read hit 15mins I pressed control+C to stop ddrescue but the disk noises continued. Eventually I unplugged the drive, it was very hot, and waited for it to cool down. Now cannot get it to be seen by the OS when connected back up :-(
So, was it working ok and I'm impatient? are those results awful and I should give up on this disk? Or is there another way? - Disk 2 was the one that was clunking before, correct.
I think the better plan is to clone disk 4. With raid redundancy, you only need to get one of the two disks back. - It does sound like disk 2 has had it. I would agree with StephenB's advice. Hopefully disk four is the healthier disk.
If that doesn't help then expensive data recovery that may not be successful would be your only option to try and get data back. - Unfortunately, disk 2 is the only one that can be seen by the system :-(
is it worth a controller swap on disk 4? - What's a controller swap?
- Controller swap = Remove the controller/board from the not recognised Readynas disk 4 and carefully replace it with a working controller from one of my new disks. Hoping that the drive can them be recognised by the system.
Strangely though, I booted into Koppix/Linux without Disk 4 connected (as machine won't boot with it connected), then connected it and the disk was found.
Started recovering from that one, it seemed to be working, but have no idea how it is getting on as I'm at work now :-(
Probably a moot point now. But if you wanted to try that, I'd use the controller in disk 2, rather than sacrifice a new disk.AndyBee1 wrote: Unfortunately, disk 2 is the only one that can be seen by the system :-(
is it worth a controller swap on disk 4?
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