ESXi reports "All Paths Down" for ReadyNAS hosted NFS share

jlehtinen wrote:

...I was also told by tech support that a complete re-build on these units is expected to be completed every 1-2 years. This was news to me. I think they switched from MBR to GPT partitions, but the disks maintain the MBR partitioning unless you do a factory reset and re-build the array. I've got a plan in place to try a full rebuild on one of our units, but it's going to take awhile. I don't know how you could do a yearly re-build on these unless you keep one storage array as a "spare" and use it to store data while you are re-building another array.

First of all, I don't buy that response. You shouldn't need to rebuild the RAID array under normal circumstances. As you point out, there is a lot of down time involved. Proposing it as routine maintenance seems crazy to me.

Though if you want to protect your data from loss, you should have a backup plan in place, so it would always be possible to rebuild the NAS if need be. Backing up to a second NAS is one approach, backing up to a cloud service is also possible. I do both (the cloud gives me good disaster recovery, but I am not sure I can count on it).

There are certainly some cases where a factory reset / rebuild is needed (or a good idea). There's a helpful article on the subject here: http://www.rnasguide.com/2011/06/22/why ... -readynas/