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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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- I believe that sct erc just lets you adjust the timeouts for error recovery. As long as the default behavior for the drive is within the timing that RAID needs to recover from a sector error then the drive can still be fine. I really think your problem is crappy product out of seagate, it's hard to conclude anything but that. If you found that the drives were getting kicked out but they were still very usable then this SCT ERC thing might be an issue and netgear to blame, but your drives have been toast. No amount of retries and recovery can overcome that. The camera is another story though. If they said compatible and it's not you should get your money back. FWIW Hitachi includes ERC even in their desktop drives, seagate only includes it on their enterprise class as far as I know.
- Same with WD, only RED and above drives have ERC (called TLER in WD terminology). But I agree, ERC is not the problem here, it's a broken product.
- It must be the whole Seagate product line (or maybe I am unlucky enough to get a "bad batch"?)
Strangely though, whilst copying the whole contents of the ReadyNas314 onto the Duov2 I have noticed some obvious behaviour:
If I am in the middle of a BIG copy of data (which I leave running overnight), then I get a handful of e-mail errors from the system. However, if as soon as the copy has finished I get inundated with e-mails of errors! Presumably at this point the NAS is under no strain to do anything as nothing is reading/writing?!?
Why all the errors under no strain? I would expect it to be the other way around!
What is the fastest way to copy from the 314 to the Duov2? I tried a backup job on one folder and it took forever to copy hardly anything. I think it managed 11MB/s max through a 10/100/1000 Netgear hub. Strangely both NAS's show up on the hub as only connecting at 10/100Mbps? Shouldn't they manage gigabit speeds?
Currently doing drag and drop through PC and managing about 4MB/s now :-( - Maybe the emails are triggered by a low priority background process? What errors are you getting?
Andy_Bee_1 wrote: What is the fastest way to copy from the 314 to the Duov2? I tried a backup job on one folder and it took forever to copy hardly anything. I think it managed 11MB/s max through a 10/100/1000 Netgear hub. Strangely both NAS's show up on the hub as only connecting at 10/100Mbps? Shouldn't they manage gigabit speeds?
How old is that switch and what model number is it?
Several small Netgear gigabit switches are affected by bad capacitors and one of the manifestations of this is that they can't negotiate at higher speeds anymore. You might want to try another gigabit switch.StephenB wrote: Maybe the emails are triggered by a low priority background process? What errors are you getting?
I am getting more disk errors through e-mail from it:
Detected increasing reallocated sector count: [13777] on disk 3 (Internal) [ST3000DM001-1CH166, Z1F29V7G] 179 times in the past 30 days.
Detected increasing ATA error count: [4200] on disk 3 (Internal) [ST3000DM001-1CH166, Z1F29V7G] 6 times in the past 30 days.mangrove wrote: How old is that switch and what model number is it?
Several small Netgear gigabit switches are affected by bad capacitors and one of the manifestations of this is that they can't negotiate at higher speeds anymore. You might want to try another gigabit switch.
The hub is a G5605v2, I agree it could be a little old, however it negotiates 1000Mbps to my PC and my Powerline adaptor.- Those counts are huge. With a non-zero ATA error count I would be inclined to replace a disk. With a reallocated sector count above 50 a disk should be replaced.
- Yes, it should be replaced. I'd suggest getting a WD30EFRX or a ST3000VN000, and not another ST3000DM001.
NAS drives have 3 year warranties, are intended for NAS use. A lot of people (including me) are using the WDC Reds with good results.
There aren't a lot of posts on the ST3000VN000, but the ones there are mostly positive. The 4 TB seagate apparently has a sector count that is slightly smaller than other 4 TB drives, which makes it hard to mix and match. I haven't heard that complaint about the 3 TB model though. - Yup, the disk died last night!
Volume Degraded for the 3rd time in just over 1 year of owning this NAS.
Who in their right mind would spend so much money on a NAS box and 4x 3TB disks?!?
I had a 1TB desktop drive which backed up to another 1TB desktop drive for years, neither ever broke! Then when I ran out of free space I upgraded to 2x 2TB drives, they never broke (still have them!). Think I should have just upgraded to 2x 3TB drives this time! Certainly would have saved me nearly £1k!!! And probably would still have all my data :-D
Just can't believe that expensive technology can be so unreliably bad!?! - I think in your case its the drives, not the NAS. I had a similar run of one failure after another with ST31500341AS drives some years ago (not in a NAS, but in several desktops and USB drives), and with some WDC drives back in the 90s. Some drive models just seem trouble-prone.
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