3200 keeps locking up and becomes unresponsive

All over the forum I see people posting up problems with their unit locking up under load or mysterious circumstances and i'm here to share my story. I cannot believe I'm having this many problems with a $7k business unit.

When I got my ReadyNas 3200 unit a bit over a year ago I set up a lun for hyper-v clustering with a CSV. I had two Win 2008 host servers and about 6 VMs on the CSV. After about a month, the unit would just become unresponsive and the only solution was to power cycle it. I worked with Level 3 for a long time and they concluded the backplane to the drives was bad and eventually replaced my unit. That ordeal lasted for two months and I had no choice but to move the VMs/files off the NAS while it was going on. After I got the replacement unit, I was able to move the VMs and files back onto the 3200 unit and things worked well until now.

I upgraded my host servers to Windows 2012 and I started getting the same issue with the readynas locking up. It first happened when I tried to use the Replicate software to replicate the Luns to a second newly purchased 3200. Level 2 support had no clue with my logs. I started researching and I thought maybe I somehow overloaded the iSCSI connections by not configuration my switches and NICS correctly. So I spent about a week turning everything on including flow control, jumbo frames, turning off spanning tree, separated the iscsi connections...and tried again. The 3200 lasted a week and seemed to be fixed. Level 2 closed the ticket.

All of the sudden over the weekend, the 3200 locked up and became unresponsive again. I power cycled it and I added in the official dual NIC adapter card thinking maybe spreading the bandwidth among 4 NICS instead of 2 on the NAS might help, it didn't. The unit locked up again. Each NIC was on its on switch with it's own subnet, each with an iSCSI connection. With this kind of instability I had no choice but to ditch the CSV for now and I moved all the VMs on to the local hosts. I left the LUN I use for file storage on thinking that without all the load of the VMs on the 3200, it should not lock up anymore. Well a day later it locked up again.

I am ready to throw this unit out the window and really regret buying a second one for replication. Level 2 support seems to be clueless with the logs and they always make it so hard to escalate things to level 3. I am going to give them a call again tomorrow and send them the new logs but i'm sure they won't be able to find anything. I'm on the latest 4.2.22 firmware btw.

Have anyone else with this type of lockup problem ever gotten a real solution to this issue? I asked around some of my buddies using other NAS/SAN devices, they never experienced lockups like this.