ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Fan Replacement

Replacing the fan yourself would void your 3 year warranty. I would recommend you contact NetGear tech support and if necessary get a RMA unit.

If it is the PSU fan, it isn't user serviceable. I just went through a warranty replacement with an advanced RMA for a failing fan after contacting support as mdgm suggests. It was relatively painless.

OK, I see your point on the PSU fan. However, if it's the main fan, it will be far, far easier and quicker to just replace it myself. I might open the unit up and get the fan part number later.

Thanks for the replies.

OK, thanks to some well-intentioned advice on these boards, I opted instead of buying a replacement fan to just RMA the unit under warranty.

Two days ago I got a replacement unit, I put the disks in it, powered it up, and noticed that the firmware version on it was 4.2.15. I had the newest, 4.2.19, on the defective unit, and proceeded to upgrade it on the new box. All went well, until the unit got stuck on Updating FW on the display. After calling support, they advised to enter the boot menu and perform an OS reinstall. I followed their advice, but to no avail. It remained stuck on Updating FW at boot.

At that point, Netgear support said they would want to telnet into the machine and see what keeps it stuck. I declined, and opted instead to do a factory default, seeing how I had plenty of backups to restore from wihtout losing anything.

Moral of the story: what could have simply be resolved with a no-brainer fan replacement (13 screws involved, including the fan mount ones) turned into an A-Team approach.

But to ship a RMA with such an old FW version is negligent at best, downright moronic at worst.

My replacement chassis shipped with an old F/W too (.17 if memory serves). I checked out the unit with a spare HDD and updated the revision to match my unit before moving the disks across.

Well it would have been nice if anyone from Netgear would have documented that. But the support person ("Jeff", or "Mike", with an accent as far from New Jersey as one could imagine) assured me all I had to do is to swap disks.

mwilson wrote:
Well it would have been nice if anyone from Netgear would have documented that. But the support person ("Jeff", or "Mike", with an accent as far from New Jersey as one could imagine) assured me all I had to do is to swap disks.

Agreed - I got this advice from somewhere on these forums. I also wanted to test my memory as my original box was upgraded to 3GB by the vendor. I didn't want to risk my data drives before being satisfied that everything was ok with the new box before moving things across.

Well I had multiple verified good backups, so it was mostly a matter of wasted time and inconvenience. Still, it denotes sloppiness on Netgear's part. One shouldn't have to scour forums after the official word was "no worries, just swap disks and you're good to go". Cheers!

The version of the FW on your replacement chassis is probably the one that was on it when it was returned to be refurbished. They have no way of knowing what version will be in use on the next system. When shipping out a replacement chassis, the next one in line is shipped out. You could have simply put your drives in the chassis and booted, as the NAS boots off the FW installed on the drives, not the one on the flash memory. That one is simply used for installation onto the drives during an OS install or factory default.

PapaBear, the ReadyNAS did indeed boot initially, but the reported firmware was 4.2.15 in FrontView, and also prompted me to upgrade to the current version when I checked in the System section.