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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS Ultra 2 = Waste of my time and money
A little while back I got a ReadyNAS Ultra 2 so that I could create a network accessible file storage drive that would also have redundancy built in, so that I ensure the safety of my core files.
I set it up and got it running fine as a standalone drive with 2 x 1 Terabyte drives configured as a mirror mode raid.
I used it straight away to back up about 840 gig worth of stuff.
So far, so good.
Then a few days ago I backed up about another 60 gig of stuff, and remembered that I still hadn’t gotten around to actually making the drive work as a ‘central’ network resource.
So yesterday I started trying to configure the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 with my Netgear DGN2200 Wireless Router and ADSL Modem.
I could not get them to work together so that I could access the ReadyNAS from the network.
The DGN2200 could see the ReadyNAS, and I could even get it to allocate a specific address to the ReadyNAS through DHCP, which it would pick up, but no computer would see the ReadyNAS unless it was connected directly to it.
I tried running DHCP through the ReadyNAS instead of the DGN2200 to see if that would resolve the problem, but I could never get the DHCP settings to ‘expose’ in the ReadyNAS.
Even if I isolated the ReadyNAS completely from the network and just connected it straight up to my Asus Notebook as a standalone device, the DHCP tab would still have a message saying that the ReadyNAS was getting DHCP settings from another setup, so I wasn’t able to configure it.
To make a long story short, I ended up doing an OS reset on the ReadyNAS, after I checked online to make sure I wouldn’t lose my files.
I got it back up and running, and at first I thought everything was okay, until I noticed that I couldn’t find any of the 60 gig of most recent files I had copied. Using Raidar I browsed the ReadyNAS, and there was no trace anywhere.
As near as I can tell, the files were never properly copied to begin with. Although I used Tetracopy, and validated them after they were copied, apparently the ReadyNAS never actually did it, it just reported that it had.
So, now I have a comparatively very expensive 1 gigabyte drive storage, which won’t do either of the two main things that to bought it for; network sharing, and safe storage through redundancy.
For the same price, I could have gotten about five times the storage space as basic hard drives, manually start them up as shared network resource off a ‘always on’ tower system, used a sync program to create a mirrored backup process, and it would have taken less of my time to do.
I’m extremely unimpressed. A huge waste of my time and money, and I’m not sure that I can actually recover any of the 60 gigabytes of files that I lost, as I deleted them from my only other source right after I’d validated that they were ‘safe’ on my ReadyNAS.
I set it up and got it running fine as a standalone drive with 2 x 1 Terabyte drives configured as a mirror mode raid.
I used it straight away to back up about 840 gig worth of stuff.
So far, so good.
Then a few days ago I backed up about another 60 gig of stuff, and remembered that I still hadn’t gotten around to actually making the drive work as a ‘central’ network resource.
So yesterday I started trying to configure the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 with my Netgear DGN2200 Wireless Router and ADSL Modem.
I could not get them to work together so that I could access the ReadyNAS from the network.
The DGN2200 could see the ReadyNAS, and I could even get it to allocate a specific address to the ReadyNAS through DHCP, which it would pick up, but no computer would see the ReadyNAS unless it was connected directly to it.
I tried running DHCP through the ReadyNAS instead of the DGN2200 to see if that would resolve the problem, but I could never get the DHCP settings to ‘expose’ in the ReadyNAS.
Even if I isolated the ReadyNAS completely from the network and just connected it straight up to my Asus Notebook as a standalone device, the DHCP tab would still have a message saying that the ReadyNAS was getting DHCP settings from another setup, so I wasn’t able to configure it.
To make a long story short, I ended up doing an OS reset on the ReadyNAS, after I checked online to make sure I wouldn’t lose my files.
I got it back up and running, and at first I thought everything was okay, until I noticed that I couldn’t find any of the 60 gig of most recent files I had copied. Using Raidar I browsed the ReadyNAS, and there was no trace anywhere.
As near as I can tell, the files were never properly copied to begin with. Although I used Tetracopy, and validated them after they were copied, apparently the ReadyNAS never actually did it, it just reported that it had.
So, now I have a comparatively very expensive 1 gigabyte drive storage, which won’t do either of the two main things that to bought it for; network sharing, and safe storage through redundancy.
For the same price, I could have gotten about five times the storage space as basic hard drives, manually start them up as shared network resource off a ‘always on’ tower system, used a sync program to create a mirrored backup process, and it would have taken less of my time to do.
I’m extremely unimpressed. A huge waste of my time and money, and I’m not sure that I can actually recover any of the 60 gigabytes of files that I lost, as I deleted them from my only other source right after I’d validated that they were ‘safe’ on my ReadyNAS.
4 Replies
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- I would suggest you open a tech support case (http://www.readynas.com/support). Please edit the thread title (i.e. subject of first post in the thread) to include your case number.
Do note that RAID is not a backup. If you primarily store important data on the ReadyNAS you should backup that data regularly (e.g. to a USB drive). - I understand what you are saying with regards to the RAID by itself not being backup, however I think you are splitting hairs.
If the ReadyNAS is intended to be my core file storage and access on the network, but right from the start I can't trust that it will do that job properly, then I can't use it as a part of any other backup process, because it IS already the failure point I'm trying to protect my data against.
And to be honest, and this point I've already wasted way too much of my valuable time with this.
For the money I paid, I feel like if it isn't going to work right out of the box, then I may as well get a refund and get one that will. Or better yet, do a bit more work (but far less than I've had to do with this so far), and pay a fraction of the price, and set this up manually, and then I know it will work the way I want it to. I don't lack the proficiency or knowledge, and the only reason why I got this unit in the first place was because I wanted to save myself time and effort, which hasn't happened. - Well I'm not sure why it didn't work, but NetGear support may have some knowledge of common router configuration issues using your router with the ReadyNAS.
As for your backup not working, you could ask them about that as well. - The DGN2200 wireless router is a combo DSL modem and wireless router. While I have not seen any comments previously about problems with it, the 2 wire version also supplied by various telecom companies in notoriously hard to deal with.
I am not familiar with Tetracopy, but do not understand why one would use a third party application since Windows copy/paste is certainly reliable.
One should never, ever trust a single device for storage of important/critical files. I maintain a current/complete backup of all my files. When copy photos off the camera to my NAS, I never delete the originals off the camera until after the first backup of the data - Just In Case. Murphy's law still is out there.
If you connect the NAS directly to your laptop and run RAIDar, what does it inicate as the IP address? Is the NAS set to pull the IP address from the router? Make note of the IP address shown in RAIDar and if it is 192.168.168.168 than it is not pulling an IP address from any DHCP server. (The laptop is not a DHCP server and the NAS can only serve as a DHCP server to OTHER devices not itself.)
If you have direct connected the unit to your laptop, the only way you would connect is if both the NAS and the laptop had static IP addresses set in the same subnet. The IP address is 4 sets of numbers, and the subnet would be the same numbers in the first three positions, with different numbers in the fourth position. For example, my DGN2000 router (wireless router only, modem is separate) uses a subnet of 192.168.1.xxx. All of my devices except my NAS units are DHCP and the router assigns a number to the device, be it printer or PC. My NAS units are set to static IP address with the fourth postiion starting with 201. With multiple NAS units this allows me to determine which NAS is which on the network map.
If you are running Vista or Win7 if you will click on the network icon in the lower right (next to the speaker icon) and then click on "Open Network and Sharing Center" at the top of the window that opens is a stylized map showing your computer name, the network name and then a globe labled "Internet". To the right of that should be the hyperlink of "See full map". This will display a map of your network with icons and name for all the connected devices that are powered up. If you will hover your cursor over the device icon, it will show the IPv4 address (as well as the IPv6 and MAC address which do not concern us here). Please not the address of your laptop and the gateway. The gateway is your router and should be 192.168.1.1. Your laptop should be 192.168.1.xxx where xxx is any number other than 1. If the NAS is shown, it should also be in the subnet with a number fourth position number different from the laptop and router.
With the NAS connected to the network, RAIDar should be able to find it, even if it is in a different subnet. If it is in a different subnet from the laptop, that is why the laptop will not connect.
Please post back with any questions and let us know if the numbers are not what you expect to see.
If you have the Ultra 2 set up as a redundant volume with X-Raid2 or even Raid5, you have a volume of approximately 930GB available to you. You have copied 840GB initially which is quite a load and then apparently added 60GB more. That only leaves you 30GB of available space which means it will be slower than normal since it does not have much free space to work with.
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