ReadyNAS: NEVER AGAIN!

NotSoReadyNAS wrote:

Hi, Just providing some feedback on my experience with NETGEAR and the ReadyNAS product. In a nutshell, the best use I can find for my [brand new] readynas 104 is as a boat anchor, and I will never buy a readyNAS (or a NetGear product) again. I bought a ReadyNAS 104 three months ago, equipped with two brand new WD Red 3TB hard drives. I first experienced the annoyance of "certified" 3rd party apps that don't install properly - I guess it can't all be blamed on NETGEAR, but what's the point of certification if not to at least validate it installs properly? I then had a first interaction with NETGEAR's Technical Support after my NAS crashed just after the initial install (the famous "Device is offline" issue, no access to network shares). I was instructed to simply unplug and replug, "it could have been a third party app"... After having copied close to 3TB of data to the NAS, it crashed a second time ("Device is offline"), but this time would not come back up after unplug / replug. Because at that time I was in the process of organising my data before setting up automatic back-ups, not all my data had been backed-up - so I had to get NETGEAR's Technical Support to remote into the NAS and copy the data across from the NAS to separate USB drives (which took 2 days to complete). I was told the issue "probably came from the fact that you upgraded the firmware to version 6.1.4/6.1.5 without doing a factory reset", as the "size of the blocks had changed and it may create some instability" (while the "disks have been checked and appear 100% healthy"). It wasn't the cause as I found out later, but I note that this risk of instability is not documented when the "update firmware" button is just a click away on the Front View interface. But anyway, the file system was corrupt and I wasn't keen for it to happen again, I needed to do something, so I followed the advice NETGEAR's Tech Support gave me: do a factory reset. Following their instructions, I did a full factory reset, re-installed everything, setup all the users etc, and re-copied across the 3 TB of data. As it seemed to be working all good, I deleted my separate back-ups to create space to setup again the automated back-ups from the NAS to a network drive. As the copy process was underway, the NAS crashed again. NETGEAR Tech Support again, the file system is corrupt again, "suspect the NAS chassis is faulty", maybe a "memory issue". The tech attempted a data recovery, which succeeded on 70% of my data, but the remaining 30% is lost. So to summarise: I used my NAS for 3 weeks out of the 3 months I've owned it. The NAS File System became corrupt twice, 30% of my data could not be recovered, whilst the main reason I bought the NAS in the first place was to have a reliable storage place to save all my data. Now NETGEAR support provided me with the option of an RMA swap with postage at my own expense, and refused to waive the $30 fee for the "Advance Ground" option which caters for prepaid postage. If you ask me, a product with this type of fault is not fit for purpose. When you are a company that makes storage devices, the least you can do for a customer that goes through 2 months of recovery process and loses some of his data as a result of your product having intermittent faults, you do go the extra mile rather than hide behind the liability waivers that your legal department have put together as a condition to get access to Technical Support (really unacceptable from my perspective, but as a customer you have no choice, particularly when your data is no longer accessible). The whole thing is a disgrace, and I'm done with ReadyNAS, never again. A word to the wise.

Hi,
I just want to say I've been experiencing similar problems with ReadyNAS (RN516). The most annoying part is the problems with apps (there are many more which I wont go into) - not only it takes super long time to install / uninstall them, but also since 6.2.2 it seems almost every uninstall of an app crashes the system. Meaning the Apache crashes so that most of the NAS functionality is gone, or so I've been told by support. i also lost data - the files simply vanished from share... at the least I still have Synology as backup for my data.

And BTW, there is something seriously wrong with Backup jobs. I set one up to use SMB / Windows authentication with Synology as destination for 1GB of files. The job would run for hours and then NAS was experiencing serious resource drain - to the point that I could not use it.

This would be my 4th try. 1st time support fixed it, and then I did factory reset two times.

At the moment I am waiting for the 3rd level support to call me back. I will give it a go one last time, and if the unit is unusable then it will go back to the store.