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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...
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- CAT5e is better than CAT5. Some higher quality CAT5 cables will work better than lower quality ones but to be sure it should work well with gigabit you need CAT5e or newer. CAT6 is a good option too.
For any CAT standard some cables will be higher quality than others. Some cables will exceed the minimum spec.
Yes. Cat 6a is better than cat 6 btw.mdgm wrote: CAT5e is better than CAT5. Some higher quality CAT5 cables will work better than lower quality ones but to be sure it should work well with gigabit you need CAT5e or newer. CAT6 is a good option too.
For any CAT standard some cables will be higher quality than others. Some cables will exceed the minimum spec.
The main difference between cat 5, cat 6 specifications is that the higher grades have less crosstalk (and noise). Crosstalk is the amount of signal from one wire that "leaks" to adjacent wires - through inductance, essentially like a transformer. Some versions have external shielding to reduce crosstalk from adjacent cables. The longer a cable is, the more crosstalk there is.
If you are running your own cable inside your walls - there are also specs on the plastic insulation used - for fire safety. Plenum and "riser" grade cables are needed (depending on where you are putting them). So it is useful to research your local building codes (or just use "plenum" grade).- Well where I live you need a licence to install cables inside walls.
Which underscores the need to research local building codes.mdgm wrote: Well where I live you need a licence to install cables inside walls.
In the US you can legally run your own cables and do your own electrical work. There are inspection requirements for anything carrying AC power, but I don't know of any inspection requirements for running speaker wires, door bell wire, network cables, coax etc.
Most of my in-wall ethernet cables were professionally installed by licensed electricians (as part of a larger project to replace the ~100 year old wiring that was in my house). I have run a few additional ethernet cables on my own, which is how I discovered the issue with insulation fire safety.
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