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Forum Discussion
Balancing Volumes makes ReadyNAS unresponsive
I've read through multiple discussions from users stating Balancing is causing problems with their ReadyNAS units. Mainly two issues...
1. Balancing can take DAYS to run. As an example one of our units has been running for 3 days and is only at 8%.
2. When balancing is run the unit becomes unusable. You may or may not be able to access the unit from the web interface and devices attempting to read/write to the volumes will fail.
One solution was to stop the balancing. That's great for the moment, but it doesn't resolve why balancing is taking so long and consuming so much of the readynas resources. Other discussions were close because of inactivity. These were issues brought up several years ago and yet the problems still exists numberous firmware builds later.
Seems Netgear isn't concerned about resolving the issue which leaves the question...Does anyone actually have a way to troubleshoot and/or rectify the problem?
11 Replies
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What Readynas models are you experiencing this on?
Is this the first time you have tried to balance the volume?
How full is the data volume?
Is there a lot of data change each day?
All of these may affect the time it takes to balance; performed regularly it should take much less time. My balance takes under a minute and is performed quarterly, but then I don't have a lot of data changing on the volume.
Balancingand scrubing operation like array rebuilding are heavy demanding operations!
vandermerwe wrote:
My balance takes under a minute and is performed quarterly, but then I don't have a lot of data changing on the volume.
Mine complete quickly also. The longer it takes, the more it is needed.
I agree that maintaining enough free space should help, and you could consider running them more frequently if the time starts to grow.
You might also try disabling spindown (if enabled) while it is running, and see if the speed picks up.
Hello All,
To answer some of the questions...
- What Readynas models are you experiencing this on? It's a 300 series, 4 bay with four 3TB drives
- Is this the first time you have tried to balance the volume? No, we've been trying to get it balanced for several months. Balancing was initially configured for monthly runs. It was changed to weekly when backups started failing because the unit was unresponsive.
- How full is the data volume? I't's around 50% used currently. At one point it was around 90% because of the snapshots. We reduced the snapshots a number of times and ultimately disabled snapshots completely.
- Is there a lot of data change each day? Yes, the device is used for backups Mon-Fri of multiple systems. Weekends have no activity so balancing is set to kick off at 1:00AM Saturday morning; after backups are completed. Last Monday night it was at 8% completed and had been running over 60 hours to get to that point. It has done this for the past three weekends.
- Spin down is not enabled.
We have other ReadyNAS units that data doesn't change as much and balancing finishes in under a minute.
We agree balancing and scrubbing can take a while, but 8% in 60 hours seems excessively slow.
In an effort to get a successful balancing run we ran balancing from 8AM-5PM every day last week. To our surprise after 45 hours of running this past weekend it completed successfully! We have it scheduled to run weekly now so the next big test will be this coming weekend; hopefully it'll complete again.
But the question is how much data was processed?
John_Salfer wrote:
In an effort to get a successful balancing run we ran balancing from 8AM-5PM every day last week. To our surprise after 45 hours of running this past weekend it completed successfully! We have it scheduled to run weekly now so the next big test will be this coming weekend; hopefully it'll complete again.
Let us know either way.
If backups happen off-shift you might find it works better to schedule daily runs (assuming there would be less churn).
Good news. Hours of working this issue to get a balance to finish has paid off. The balancing two weeks ago took around 12 hours and last weekend took under 2. We'll continue to run them weekly in hopes that we don't see this issue come up again.
We also hope Netgear does something so other users don't have to go through what we had to endure. Allowing one process to completely consume the ReadyNAS makes for a very poor design.
Thanks for everyones input.
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