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Forum Discussion
Readynas Ultra6 horrible experience: 4 drives dead now!
I regret buying a ReadyNas Ultra6. I've had 4 Readynas 4-drive units in the past and they've all performed well. The 6-drive unit has been a total disaster.
I had the previous unit replaced by Netgear 2 months ago, and the replacement now has the same exact problem. Either I'm the unluckiest guy in the world, or there's some major hardware design flaw here.
My first Ultra 6 unit, bought in June, had 6 identical Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 drives (which I bought because they are on the compatibility list). After a few weeks (during which the unit kept becoming unresponsive and had to be constantly rebooted), 2 of the drives died, simultaneously and without any warnings or Smart errors.
I replaced them with 2 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 (also on the compatibility list). The device kept freezing and becoming unresponsive after 1 or 2 weeks of uptime. I couldn't use it because it would always disappear from the network and become unresponsive every 10/15 days of uptime.
After a long back and forth with Netgear support (where I sent them log files and tried every thing they asked me to try) I got an RMA and a replacement unit. I put the drives in the new unit, reinitialized and reconfigured from scratch, reinstalled all my data (note that the unit was only 5% full because I didn't really trust it with any sensitive data given the unreliability). Firmware is RAIDiator-x86 4.2.21. That was on September 15. I had not had a problem in 2 months so I thought that the replacement had solved all my problems and I had just been unlucky with my first unit.
This morning, I found the Ultra 6 to be unresponsive -- deja vu all over again. Power led was on, but pressing the button would not bring up anything on the front pane. RAIDair would not detect it, drives were unaccessible, the whole shebang. Only thing I could do was turn it off and back on again.
After restarting, I log into the frontview panel and see saw that 2 drives are dead. Again, 2 at the at the same time. This time it's one Hitachi and one Seagate:
Device Description Status
Disk 1 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 41 C / 105 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 2 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 44 C / 111 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 3 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 1863 GB , 35 C / 95 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 4 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 1863 GB , 35 C / 95 F Dead
Disk 5 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 42 C / 107 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 6 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 0 C / 32 F Dead
Fan SYS2 932 RPM OK
Temp CPU 17 C / 62 F [Normal 0-65 C / 32-149 F] OK
Temp SYS 30 C / 86 F [Normal 0-60 C / 32-140 F] OK
Either I am the unluckiest person in the world, or there is some serious design flaw with this product. There's no way 2 drives from 2 different brands die simultaneously, twice in a row, with two different units. The unit is in a ventilated area, in an air conditioned room where temperature never goes above 73 degrees, attached to an approved UPS unit (though I had not yet hooked up the UPS via USB this time). I never got a SMART warning or temperature warning or anything at all. Zero indication of a pending failure.
I am beside myself with anger: I have spent a substantial amount of money and time with this thing, and have now 4 (four) dead hard drives and haven't been able to get any use out of this unit.
I have 3 other ReadyNas units (NV+) on the same network in the same room and they work flawlessly, with fairly heavy use (storage and backups) and months of uptime. I still even have an old ReadyNas 600 that's 7 years old in a different location, and that one still works perfectly too! The Ultra 6 however has turned out to be a total piece of junk.
Am I the only one who had this kind of experience? Needless to say, whatever trust I had in this brand/product line has totally evaporated. I'm never going to buy another ReadyNas again.
I had the previous unit replaced by Netgear 2 months ago, and the replacement now has the same exact problem. Either I'm the unluckiest guy in the world, or there's some major hardware design flaw here.
My first Ultra 6 unit, bought in June, had 6 identical Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 drives (which I bought because they are on the compatibility list). After a few weeks (during which the unit kept becoming unresponsive and had to be constantly rebooted), 2 of the drives died, simultaneously and without any warnings or Smart errors.
I replaced them with 2 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 (also on the compatibility list). The device kept freezing and becoming unresponsive after 1 or 2 weeks of uptime. I couldn't use it because it would always disappear from the network and become unresponsive every 10/15 days of uptime.
After a long back and forth with Netgear support (where I sent them log files and tried every thing they asked me to try) I got an RMA and a replacement unit. I put the drives in the new unit, reinitialized and reconfigured from scratch, reinstalled all my data (note that the unit was only 5% full because I didn't really trust it with any sensitive data given the unreliability). Firmware is RAIDiator-x86 4.2.21. That was on September 15. I had not had a problem in 2 months so I thought that the replacement had solved all my problems and I had just been unlucky with my first unit.
This morning, I found the Ultra 6 to be unresponsive -- deja vu all over again. Power led was on, but pressing the button would not bring up anything on the front pane. RAIDair would not detect it, drives were unaccessible, the whole shebang. Only thing I could do was turn it off and back on again.
After restarting, I log into the frontview panel and see saw that 2 drives are dead. Again, 2 at the at the same time. This time it's one Hitachi and one Seagate:
Device Description Status
Disk 1 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 41 C / 105 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 2 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 44 C / 111 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 3 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 1863 GB , 35 C / 95 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 4 Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 1863 GB , 35 C / 95 F Dead
Disk 5 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 42 C / 107 F , Write-cache ON OK
Disk 6 Hitachi HUA722020ALA330 1863 GB , 0 C / 32 F Dead
Fan SYS2 932 RPM OK
Temp CPU 17 C / 62 F [Normal 0-65 C / 32-149 F] OK
Temp SYS 30 C / 86 F [Normal 0-60 C / 32-140 F] OK
Either I am the unluckiest person in the world, or there is some serious design flaw with this product. There's no way 2 drives from 2 different brands die simultaneously, twice in a row, with two different units. The unit is in a ventilated area, in an air conditioned room where temperature never goes above 73 degrees, attached to an approved UPS unit (though I had not yet hooked up the UPS via USB this time). I never got a SMART warning or temperature warning or anything at all. Zero indication of a pending failure.
I am beside myself with anger: I have spent a substantial amount of money and time with this thing, and have now 4 (four) dead hard drives and haven't been able to get any use out of this unit.
I have 3 other ReadyNas units (NV+) on the same network in the same room and they work flawlessly, with fairly heavy use (storage and backups) and months of uptime. I still even have an old ReadyNas 600 that's 7 years old in a different location, and that one still works perfectly too! The Ultra 6 however has turned out to be a total piece of junk.
Am I the only one who had this kind of experience? Needless to say, whatever trust I had in this brand/product line has totally evaporated. I'm never going to buy another ReadyNas again.
8 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- What firmware is on those SeaGate disks? You need CC3D firmware or newer on that model.
The Hitachi isn't reporting a valid temperature so I'd think that disk is definitely dead.
Open a new support case and post your case number. Hopefully they can take a look at your logs and perhaps remotely login to investigate.
Disks can and do fail at any time. Also it's possible you may have got disks from a bad batch of Hitachis.
Did you know that you could have configured your NAS to use dual-redundancy so that if any two disks failed data remains intact? - I have a support case open (19808615) but frankly I lost all faith in the product so I don't even know if I'm going to want a replacement or any other solution.
Redudancy is not the issue here. Yes, I have dual-redundancy, but the problem is not the data (I didn't have anything there that was worth saving, and the unit was less than 5% full). The problem is the insanely high rate of failure with this specific product, and the way they are failing.
Yes, disks can fail at any time, but 4 disks failing 2 at a time 2 months apart while installed in the same type of Readynas? That stretches the definition of coincidence past the breaking limit. I've had disks fail before, even without a warning. The disks come from shipments of several similar units that have been working flawlessly installed in other ReadyNas and other externals storage. They only fail spectacularly in the ReadyNas Ultra 6.
And let's assume for the sake of argument that all 4 disks were defective -- both units exhibited the same behavior (frozen and unresponsive) instead of sending an alert that the disk had failed. Even if the disks died of natural causes, this is not acceptable. The Readynas should have generated an alert or at least let me access Frontview and look at the status instead of becoming a chunk of metal and requiring a hard reboot. If I had not been near the device I would not have know what had happened.
At this point I'd just like to know if this has happened to anyone else. - Honestly I think you've just had bad luck with drives. Seagate has been struggling with a number of problems and every other drive vendor was slammed by the flooding issue last fall. It would not surprise me if drive quality has faltered through this time period. If those drives work in a different enclosure or system after you pulled them then that's a different story.
Although not acceptable, I suspect there are Linux kernel bugs that a really bad drive can hit to trigger a hang. You should discuss with netgear or have a look at the system messages to see what was going on at the time it hung.
FWIW My Pro-6 has been running 4 unsupported disks for 18 months with no problems and I'm currently running 4.2.21. - There are several posters here had issues with ST2000DL003 drives.
- With the proviso that I have not yet tested this myself, there's a forum post on the Seagate forums with a new firmware that supposedly fixes the issue these drives have with running in a NAS:
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/ST2000DL003-9VT166-firmware-upgrade-CC3D-fixes-NAS-issues/td-p/178606
Good luck if you try this out.
Cheers
Ferg - ferg, I guess you haven't noticed this thread: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=64510 which also indicates the CC3D firmware update is needed.
- Hi mdgm, no I had not seen that! Many thanks for letting me know, and sorry for the redundancy!
- vertigo2712 - it may be bad luck with the drives or it may be bad luck with the NAS. Unless there is a problem in the PSU though, I don't see how any NAS could destroy a HD. In my first NAS, and NV+, I lost a drive within the first 30 days. I came into the room and noticed only one drive light on. I shut down the unit and the drive with the light off was cool to the touch while the other drive was warm.
I have had a Pro 6 for several months so far, with no problems. It had two Hitachi 3TB green drives and two Seagate 1TB drives until a little over a month ago when the Seagates were replaced with 1TB WD Red WD10EFRX and this weekend the Hitachis were replaced with WD30EFRX drives.
I would be more inclined to blame the drives.
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