Constant Disk activity RN104 w/6.1.8

That would be contrary to the standard behavior of a disk activity light as has been established by over 30 years of precedent. No activity was always OFF and when there was activity it would blink. So a solid light meant that there was so much activity that you could not see the times when the light was off.

Can we get someone from Netgear to confirm this? Is the activity light supposed to be on SOLID when there is NO activity? If so, please fix that in a firmware update!

http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/ ... ct2013.pdf
page 21.

on => disk present
off => no disk
blink => activity

I know nobody reads the manuals anymore...

PS : I should have asked from the beginning if "on" was solid or blinking, I assumed blinking and I assumed that you were hearing disks reading/writing. My bad.

Personally I think that "on" makes sense for "disk present".

If "off" means disk present but not used, and also means "no disk" or "disk failed", then I can't tell if something is wrong. Its much better as its documented.

I don't want it changed.

I'm not talking about the lights labelled 1,2,3,4 that indicate a disk is inserted into a given slot in the RN104. I'm talking about the round blue light that is labelled "act." My lights labelled 1,2,3,4 are always on solid as soon as the RAID array comes online, indicating that the disks in those slots are online and ready. They NEVER blink.

2twisty wrote:
I'm not talking about the lights labelled 1,2,3,4 that indicate a disk is inserted into a given slot in the RN104. I'm talking about the round blue light that is labelled "act." My lights labelled 1,2,3,4 are always on solid as soon as the RAID array comes online, indicating that the disks in those slots are online and ready. They NEVER blink.

yes, you do have a point on "act" - that the individual disk lights ought to be enough. Though xeltros is quoting from the right part of the documentation, and therefore it is "working as designed".

Yeah, I saw that.

It's a dumb design since it flies in the face of over 30 years of precedent, and there is already a way to tell if a disk is inserted.

Well, now that I know that a solid light means (essentially) nothing, I will just ignore it. I guess the scrub and defrag were really all I needed, since MySQL and file performance has returned to what I consider to be "acceptable."

I still would like to see the light's function change -- to comply with standards.

There are several standards. On some USB disk you will find a similar working design, the led representing both power and activity. You also have models that have only one led but with colour changing (E.G blue=on, red=activity).
I am for standards, that said I don't think that the LED thing is a standard, merely a habit. A standard is meant for compatibility, here that's not the case. I remember times where PC were in plastic cases with only ports on the rear side and green leds. Now we have metal cases with a glass to see inside, lights everywhere, main ports on the front and blue leds. Nobody cared, and some improvements like this were actually useful, like the fact that my Antec P182SE has the power supply at the bottom, it first created problems with cable lengths, but it helped a lot for heat management afterwards.

Microsoft now ships xbox one without kinect, so kinect games won't be developed as intensively as they should have been. I would love to see good kinect games, but with that decision (which was made for Microsoft by folks that refused innovation), I'm not likely to see an hybrid game nor a kinect FPS (remember time crisis 2 in arcade ? I'm pretty sure we can do that with kinect).
There is always room to negotiate things and people just tend to accept or refuse, for kinect, a free game (in addition to xbox fitness) or a 1year gold membership or a 2 years warranty extension would have solved the cost issue (and could have been done retroactively for early adopters). We could even imagine that microsoft could have negotiated with health insurance (or state/country to skip sales tax), you get a(n optional) discount on the console (or health insurance fees) but you have to play a kinect game for 2h a week (WHO recommendation) for a year (with a start bonus of 10H to make up for holidays), if you don't get your quota the console enters in limited functionality, preventing non-kinect game launch for exemple. After a year quota checking is disabled.
Or a kindle-like model, you get a 30second ad on each boot and each game launch but you get a discount on the console.

I agree that, here, it's mainly cosmetic and comes down to preferences (unless it impacts the LED's life expectancy), but I think it's best to let manufacturers do their things the way they want unless it's clearly impairing the usage, in which case nobody would buy. I believe that innovation begins with creative freedom, if people keep asking for things to look the way they always did, I don't think we will get innovation. As long as it is properly documented I don't see any problem. Maybe they are planning some cheap one bay NAS with only that led ? Not sure how EDA-500 works either, maybe it uses the same system ? Or maybe those leds tend to fail and this is easier to detect it that way ?
Of course if this is because an engineer just thought, "hey it's fun !", an option in OS6 would be welcomed, but I don't think they did this without an idea in the back of their head.

There's no industry standard here (certainly not one you can name), but in many cases like this there is industry convergence anyway. The main point 2twisty is making is that it doesn't work the way he expects, which certainly has some weight whether there is a formal standard or not. I don't know if there is a unified industry practice on this or not, but ReadyNAS is the only NAS I've ever owned, and I don't have any data-center experience - so I have no way to judge that.

As far as memories go, personally I used early minicomputers with lots of lights, the ability to enter data (and instructions) into memory from the front panel, hardware breakpoints, etc. When computer front panels disappeared, I missed a lot of those features. The light on the hard drive - if you were lucky enough to have one - meant it had finally finished spin-up and gone on-line so you could use it - which took minutes. It went off when spin-down was finished, so you could remove the platter from the drive - the platters seemed about the size of storm drain covers (well not quite), and placed inside removable cartridges.

BTW, I have participated in many consumer-product evals/betas. On thing everyone has opinions on is the LEDS. Usually its not about what the LED status actually means. Its more about how visible they are. If the product is in your bedroom or home theater, you want the LEDS totally off, and you certainly don't want anything that blinks. If its in an office or rack, you want them bright and easily seen. I totally get this - I have an R7000 in an upstairs bedroom, and I am happy that the GUI has a way to turn the leds off.

I believe I can recognise disk activity when I see and hear it...

I have two ReadyNAS 104 boxes, both with two 4TB drives configured in X-RAID2 as per default. FW version is 6.1.9. One box is just sitting there quietly, showing no significant disk activity unless I access it. The other one is frantically working 24 hours a day. The disk activity LED is blinking all the time and I can hear the drives rattling. What I can't work out is what it's doing. Nobody is accessing the box. A network trace reveals nothing more than an occasional NTP or SSDP packet and such like - nothing that might correlate with disk activity. The disk activity continues even when I pull the network cable. When I reboot the box, things remains quiet for a few minutes after the box comes back up, but then the disk activity resumes. There is no indication of anything happening in the log, except the daily snapshots. I'm not running any extras. I've experimented with backup jobs and cloud backup, but I've turned all of that off.

I don't know exactly when this behaviour started, but it's now been going on for perhaps 10 days. I've had the box only for 2 weeks. In the first 3 or 4 days, I copied 1.7 TB to it. Since then, the box has been idle except for the occasional test. What might explain the contrast with the quiet behaviour of the other ReadyNAS box? This other box has only 500 GB on it, and it's had them for perhaps 2 months.

I don't know if the unexplained disk activity affects performance or has any other unwanted effects, but if it is going to go on, I'm worried first about my electricity bill, and second about the life time of my hard drives.

I was having the exact same issue. Constant disc activity, blinking "act" light, drives making a ton of read/write noise. Restarting ReadyDLNA and disabling autoscan seemed to fix the problem.