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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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- Yup, I had five out of six 1TB Seagate nearline drives in a RAID5 die in under a year. The last time two died almost simultaneously, taking the array with it. This was a Dell server with next-day business support so replacements were always swift, but you cannot guarantee that the hardware actually functions...
It's easy to say "well you should have everything backed up" but for a small home-user that's not doable with multi-terabyte arrays. 9TB array, where should I back that up? The only possible thing is another identical array and now we're talking serious money... so in reality, we will have to prioritize data, backing up the important structures and hoping for the best for the rest of them. And in "hoping for the best" is, unfortunately, a certain amount of trust in hardware manufacturers... :-/ - I am a home user with a 12 TB volume on my Pro-6 (about 8 TB used), and I do maintain 2 full local backups - though I agree the money does add up. Fortunately the 5 and 6 TB drives seem to be driving prices down a bit on the 3 and 4 TB sizes. Hopefully that will last.
I've used WDC drives for a while now, and (so far) have had no issues with the WDC Reds. Though of course, they aren't that old yet - the first one was installed about 2 years ago, but most have been in service about 18 months. - I hope (in a strange way) that it is the drives that are the problem. Having done a lot more reading they really aren't that suitable for an always on NAS at all, especially with continuous writing from the camera/Surveillance Add-on - Naughty Netgear for putting them in their compatibility list to start with!
So... I have 4x 3TB Seagate ST3000VN000 NAS drives coming tomorrow. From the marketing waffle and peoples reviews these should do it!
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/nas-drives/nas-hdd/?sku=ST3000VN000#features
Now I have the Duo v2 with a full backup, hopefully getting all the data back on the 314 shouldn't be too hard?! And then I'll keep the Duo v2 as my onsite backup.
A note about the copying speed I mentioned earlier. I was getting about 4MB/s (hence why it took so long), until the volume got degraded (which I guess was when the drive gave up), then it shot up to 36MB/s - That saved about another 2 days of copying :-) I guess the drive struggling was slowing everything down. - 4x Seagate 3TB NAS drives arrived and placed into ReadyNas314
The ReadyNas did a factory reset when powered on, and spent the next 24hrs doing the Resync data xx.xx% thing.
When it had finished I thought I would be able to start using it. But no!
On the LED it says "cannot connect discovery server". I can't connect to it in a browser window. RAIDar finds the device on 192.168.0.24 but shows no info, and can't access setup. This is the same IP my router reports and I can ping it fine.
So I tried to do an OS reinstall, it wouldn't do it saying "ERR: Disks used see RAIDar" on the LED screen
Now doing another factory reset, so got to wait another 24hrs...
Any ideas why it's being an a*se?
Shall I just send this unit back? I have spent more time trying to get it to work than it has actually worked! - Perhaps start a new thread if you have the same problem.
I haven't read the whole thread, but your resadynas has access to a dhcp server?
What is your PC IP address? - Yes my router is DHCP enabled and has given it the IP of 192.168.0.24. My PC is 192.168.0.10 (static)
Just got ReadyCloud to discover it (first time so far), and managed to configure it to be Managed through ReadyCloud. Says it's rebuilding (1.73% so far!)
Now web browser to it's IP just gives me a file list:Index of /
Name Last modified Size Description
appcache_1.0.2.64.appcache 14-Apr-2014 00:13 600
browse_1.0.2.64.js 14-Apr-2014 00:12 1.0M
callback.html 13-Apr-2014 23:56 2.6K
css/ 19-Aug-2014 14:48 -
extjs/ 19-Aug-2014 14:48 -
favicon.ico 01-Jun-2013 01:09 3.6K
fonts/ 19-Aug-2014 14:48 -
frontview_1.0.2.64.js 14-Apr-2014 00:12 2.2M
lfsdownload.cgi 14-Apr-2014 17:30 32K
lfsupload.cgi 14-Apr-2014 17:30 46K
recovery/ 19-Aug-2014 14:48 -
wizard_1.0.2.64.js 19-Aug-2014 14:48 340K
Apache/2.2.25 (Debian) Server at 192.168.0.24 Port 443
Is that right, or is the OS/Frontview knackered too? - Perhaps let it finish rebuilding.
Using readycloud could you access the GUI?
Does raidar see it now and can you connect to the GUI using raidar?
If neither of these are possible you should contact support. - You shouldn't get a file list. There are files missing from that list such as index.html (index.html being missing is why you are getting a file list in the first place).
This issue is only encountered when doing a factory default and is addressed in the next firmware release.
If ReadyCloud gives you the option to be able to install the firmware over the top of itself do that.
Otherwise if you put the NAS in tech support mode, agree to http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20932/~/netgear-remote-access-policy and let me know the 5-digit Port/I.D. I can fix this for you (should only take a few minutes, but that does depend on the speed of your internet connection). mdgm wrote: Otherwise if you put the NAS in tech support mode, agree to http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detai ... ess-policy and let me know the 5-digit Port/I.D. I can fix this for you (should only take a few minutes, but that does depend on the speed of your internet connection).
Many thanks mdgm, I have sent you a pm with the info you requested.
I agree to the terms
Internet connection is 78Mbps so should be all good- Try another a factory default.
It should work this time.
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