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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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- Disk Do Fail & the root cause is based on multiple factors , unfortunate this situation has been there for ages now . May be the failure rates would have decreased , but the use of large capacity HDD have increased many times .
Imagining If Disk never fail ...
1) Raid concept would not have been out of date
2) Data recovery Industry would not be growing every year
If Entry NAS was the solution for Data to be safe for ever , then Expensive BIG IT Vendors costing more than will not be able to perform in the current market .
Data should be in always two locations if you are using SMB NAS devices . It can be scattered , but present somewhere .
If we say that i have got a NAS and its Raid protected , What if two disks fail and no one noticed it ? NAS with Raid 5 or 1 can support only One disk Failure Support .There are multiple HDD options from manufactures Desktop / NAS Series / Enterprise Series . Based on your application & usage we need to choose the disks . Putting a cost effective disk out of the league , and store critical data will increase the risk . Its not that it will fail , Question is "If its fails what next ?"
Even BIG IT Vendors may not give data guarantee after spending more than 10K USD . I remember a cloud service provider , where many customer data was stored crashed few years back .
Failures are everywhere & point i would note is how critical is the data and do i have my data in two locations . - The ReadyNAS 314 is now working :) Thanks mdgm
I am now trying to put all the data back onto it from my ReadyNas Duo v2, and tried doing a Backup using Rsync.
It's really slow in transferring the data. I notice the Ethernet port on the ReadyNas 314 is connected at 100Mbps. Why is this? How can I force it to renegotiate at 1000Mpbs?
The ReadyNas 314 and the ReadyNas Duo v2 are both connected to a Netgear G5605 Gigabit switch. - You could also try using the other port of course.
How long is the RN314 cable? Is it cat5e or cat6? - The cable is just a patch lead, about 60cms
It has shown as being 1000Mbps before (green) but every time I've looked at it recently it is just 100Mbps (orange) on the switch? - Try a different port on the switch as Stephen suggested. Do try changing the patch lead for another if you can.
The patch lead still may have written on it what standard it is.
Any other devices showing up as connected at 100 Mbps?
It should auto negotiate to 1000 Mbps. - Lead says Cat 5e, other lead I tried before says Cat 5e. Both negotiated at 100Mbps.
So I tried a 3rd lead... Bingo! 1Gbps :)
Filed both the other cables under T in the trash can :@ - That two cables would be bad is amazingly unlikely. The theory that the capacitors in the switch are bad (a switch known for its bad capacitors) is much more likely. Check what speeds you actually get when copying.
Though he did get gigabit with the third cable, which is puzzling.mangrove wrote: That two cables would be bad is amazingly unlikely. The theory that the capacitors in the switch are bad (a switch known for its bad capacitors) is much more likely. Check what speeds you actually get when copying.
I think I'd let well enough alone, but keep an eye on the link speed. If the problem happens again then I'd replace the switch - unmanaged gigabit switches aren't expensive.- Not really -- it might be shorter, it might be CAT6, it might be a higher quality CAT5. It might have slightly different electrical properties or the switch just happened to be able to negotiate at that time. As you say, the proof is in how it will work in the future.
Personally I always replace the capacitors in these cases. It's cheap and very easy, and you do nature a favor, too. - I assuming as you wrote "higher quality CAT5" you are referring to full copper high gauge. High gauge wires are more reliable as compared to medium ones. Most tech guys suggest using Cat6 in Structured Cabling, you may check <LINK REMOVED BY MODERATOR> for more information. Because it is future proof and also provide interrupted connection and higher data transfers speed over networking.
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