NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
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
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Unless the manufacturer has a service like that of his own, of course it will void the warranty, in fact warranty is void as soon as they see that a screw was removed or when they have surge, water or fall traces. The problem is to know when they see it, some manufacturers have indicators to see that, other don't bother.
The best thing is to contact the manufacturer and to plan something with him. They may be able to suggest better solution and trusted professionals for recovery. But I can tell you this won't be cheap, of that I'm pretty sure. - Ok, thanks xeltros :)
- hey guys, just stumbled across this. i was the L3 working on this back in april.
the disks were completely dead. the system couldnt see those 2 drives at all.
and what cannot be seen, cannot be cloned.
the later posts by andy proved my point. these drives are dead by every definition.
the only thing that may work is to have a professional company disassemble the drive in a clean room environment and have them attempt to recover data.
this usually costs a load of money and is only worth it if the data is truly irreplacable or has a lot of money attached to it (like financial data of the company).
i would estimate this costs at least 4 digit sum (just guessing here). - Hi bessier, thanks for your attempts to recover it back in April.
I have sent the disks to a company who gave me a quote range much less than 4 digits (but still in the few hundreds), so we shall see if that is still the price when they analyse the disks in a day or two... - well i wish you the best of luck with that.
please keep us updated. - The disks went off to a Data recovery company who lie about their pricing and try to force you to part with a lot of money for no result. Luckily I spotted a page on the internet about them before I spent the money. They have been reported to the Trading Standards Office here in uk over 400 times already! They were also revealed on a german TV program. Googel Fields Data Recovry (or their many other scam names)
http://www.datarecoverycompanies.co.uk/fields-data-recovery-article-i164.html
Anyway...
I bought 2 replacement drives, and spent a month or so rebuilding about 50% of my data (from previous disks, and then more recent stuff dotted around).
Amazingly, disk 3 now suddenly starts producing errors! SO I turned the damn thing off.
Got my old ReadyNas Duo v2 (which has never thrown a disk error to my knowledge) all connected up, factory reset, and upgraded. To make a backup of the ReadyNas314
Low and behold, the thing won't turn on properly.
The LED said booting, the Power light flashed for a long time, but couldn't connect the browser. The LED display now alternates between OS version and name/IP, and the Power light and disk lights are all on permanently. 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.
But still no life.
Device is Offline.
Sorry, we could not restore the connection.
Do not reboot the device.
Call Netgear technical support (I'm not in USA!)
God, what a disaster this purchase was! :-( - This new problem is on the duo v2?
They have local numbers in quite a few countries = including the UK. 0844 875 4000 is the number for home products shown on support.netgear.com. Though you might need to use paid support for this if you use the phone. - Unfortunately, those ST3000DM001 drives seems to be complete crap (check out all the Newegg reviews, mindboggling). It happens -- some WD models have been terrible too, and we all remember the Deathstars. That being said, I think several Seagate lines have been really flaky the last couple of years, and that includes everything from laptop drive to enterprise SAS drives (meaning their near-line 7200 rpm storage, but 10k and up seems to work, OTOH I have fewer of the latter).
- This disk dying is on the ReadyNas 314 again. 3 out of the 4 original drives I put in are now dead!
I have Seagate drives in the Duo (x2), the Pro4 (x4), the 3200 (x12) of which none have had a serious disk error in 3 years
I think you are right, it is perhaps these specific ST3000DM001 drives!
Do you think there is some comeback for customers because of HOW bad they are and the problems they have caused? - Interestingly I have searched a bit about these drives, and have come across many other people with similar problems with many NAS types and using these Seagate ST3000DM001 drives.
Seems these drives don't support the "SCT Error Recovery Control command" which is important when used in anything above a RAID 0/1, and as such Seagate don''t support Raid 5/6/10 on these drives!
Can Netgear explain why they have put them in their compatibility listing for this and other ReadyNAS boxes?
What I am saying is that I bought unsuitable drives for my ReadyNas based on Netgears compatibility listing and as such have spent a lot of money on drives that will not work reliably regardless of how many times I convince Seagate to replace them!
I think it is about time I got some kind of compensation for this abysmal ReadyNAS/disk combo that Netgear advertise as working together!!
If I lose my data again I am going to go on the war path and will seek legal advice and take court action if advised. Might as well get back the money for the £600 camera on the compatibility list too that doesn't work with Surveillance (that hadn't even finished being written when I bought the box)
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
