Poor experience with support and 4200 hardware replacement

I am merely sharing my recent experience and how it shaped my opinion of this product. These views are expressly mine and not the views of Netgear, my employer or anyone else.

At 9k-16k I considered the 4200 an enterprise class device. Perhaps Netgear doesn't or my expectations for an enterprise product is inconsistent with theirs. After my recent support experience I would caution anyone with utilizing this product in an enterprise environment. While I can only assume my experience would have been better if I had a paid support contract I can’t speak to that as I don’t have a paid support contract. My device came with 3 year NBD hardware replacement and while it doesn’t specifically list timely troubleshooting leading up to replacement I would have assumed that was included. In the end they did provide NBD hardware replacement but there was more downtime associated with this issue than is acceptable.


My Device Warranty Coverage:

Country of Purchase: United States
Purchased on: 29/Sep/2011
Registered on: 11/Oct/2011

Standard Product Warranty:
- Hardware Warranty: Available till 27/Sep/2016
- Free Installation Support Warranty: Expired on 28/Dec/2011
- Power Supply Warranty: Expired on 27/Sep/2016
- Accessories Warranty: Expired on 27/Sep/2016

Advanced Support / Hardware Contracts:
Onsite NBD Replacement - NA, 3 Yrs - Available till 28/Sep/2014

A little background.

On 16 July 2012 I inserted a disk in slot 9 to expand capacity of my 4200v1. This was a disk on the ReadyNAS compatibility list and I had happened to buy 2 just to have a spare in the event I lost a drive in my RAID 6 array. Upon insertion nothing happened. I decided to try the second disk I had purchased thinking I may have received a bad drive. This garnered the same result and the readynas did not detect that disk either. At this point I did a little leg work on my end to make sure I didn't have 2 bad drives. Both drives passed the seatools tests with no errors. At this point I decided to open a support ticket.

I opened my initial ticket at 13:55 CDT (my local timezone) with the following information.

7/16/2012 6:55:00 PM
MAC address:
Purchased new hard drive for expansion (ST2000NM0011) does not spin up when put in slot. I purchased two of these drives (one for a spare) and neither spin up in readynas slot 9. I do not want to skip a slot so I haven’t populated slot 10,11, or 12. These drives spin up and test good on PC.

As soon as the ticket was opened I submitted my ReadyNAS logs via the support portal to speed up the process of getting this issue resolved.

I received an automated email 16 July at 22:30 local time.

***This is an automated follow-up reply. ***

We appreciate your continuous patience and understanding. This is to acknowledge that our team has received your e-mail query however additional time is necessary to effectively process your request. One of our support engineers will get back with you very shortly. Thank you for choosing NETGEAR.

I finally received a response from a technician on 17 July at 21:48 local requesting logs. I unfortunately wasn't at work at 21:48 and wasn't able to respond back till the next morning that I had already sent the logs. After I responded that the logs were already in his possession on 18 July at 7:07 local I received a response apologizing for the oversight at 23:07 local. I wasn't at work at 23:07 on 18 July so troubleshooting actually had to wait until 19 July. 19 July now the real troubleshooting began almost 33 hours after the initial ticket. In my mind 33 hours is and unacceptable turnaround time from initial contact to start basic troubleshooting.

19 July was devoted to various test involving removing all disks, putting the new disks in slots 9,10,11,12 while powering down between each swap. Re-installing firmware. This certainly isn't something that is easy to do on a production system. This involved a series of back and forth support portal updates that finally ended in this tech realizing that I needed to call in for a replacement. This was around 16:34 local. All together all these troubleshooting steps took a few hours rendering my device unusable by my end users.

If this had ended there and they had replaced the device it would have been a mediocre support experience but the journey was far from over.

I will note here that I do not work on Fridays and 19 July was a Thursday so I was unable to call until Monday morning 23 July. This certainly isn't a Netgear support problem or fault and I can't complain about time the case sat open because I was not at work during what is typically regular business hours.

Upon calling in via telephone on Monday I was assigned a new case number and spoke with who I assume was a level 2 technician. After recounting the entire course of events and steps I had taken I was told to send the logs again. I sent the logs and waited. To further complicate matters I had received an alert from my ReadyNAS on Friday 20 July that a disk was detected in slot 9 (I had left this disk in after last power up on Thursday around 16:00 so it just automagically decided to spin up Friday around 17:00) While the ReadyNAS sent me an alert stating it was expanding it never did and worse than that counted disk 9 toward my RAID6 array meaning that I wasn't truly redundant since no data was on disk 9. After the tech received my logs he told me they needed 24 hours to look over the logs. I called back after around 26 or 27 hours as I had not heard back from anyone and was told they still needed more time and someone would contact me. This time was critical because of the false redundancy that was in place.

As a side note I experienced a ISDN-PRI failure during this time which made it impossible for Netgear to communicate with me via phone. I was able to call them on my Google voice number and left that number with them but still had difficulty beyond both our controls communicating. At this point email communication was utilized to a small extent.

When full voice communication was finally restored I was told that leve3 stated I needed to factory reset because disk expansion can't happen past 16Tb and this was the 9th drive. I always assumed that the 16Tb limit was volume size and not raw size and questioned this but never got a firm answer just that I needed to do a factory reset. I went to the forums and others confirmed my assumption that the 16Tb was volume size and I was sitting at 11Tb before inserting disk 9. Anyway upon telling me this they closed this case:

since case # XXXXX838 has been closed per the 16TB limit, I will close this case.

Well my case was apparently closed but that wasn't then end of the saga. I still didn't have a functioning device.

The next day or two was spent trying to make sure my backups were good, checking rsynced data on my other ReadyNAS and backing up a massive amount of replicate data that was seeded from a remote ReadyNAS.

Once all data backups were checked I did a factory reset as requested. Drive 9 still didn't show up. Then it did. After another factory reset drive 9 showed up immediately and did a total sync. In the end I did another factory reset and drive 9 was absent again. During this time I also checked SATA cable connection to the motherboard and didn’t see any connection issues. I still didn't trust it and finally convinced level 2 to do a swap on the chassis.

2 August – Success replacement hardware approved.

Unfortunately I wasn't at work 2 or 3 August so it was 6 August before the transaction for replacement was processed.

After this happened it was easy to do the hardware swap, I just had to copy all my data back over, get a new replicate license since those are tied to serial number on the ReadyNAS. Just a lot of downtime associated with this relatively simple problem that support seemed draw out unnecessarily.


Some take aways:

So I know the 4200 has NBD support but if it takes 33 hours from initial contact to start troubleshooting something is broken. Perhaps this could have been avoided if the technicians weren’t in Cork, Ireland. The long turn around times between online tech submission updates was frustrating. Technicians responding via email at 23:00 local time was also frustrating. As soon as my data was at risk because of the failed expansion the clock was ticking. While it was frustrating from 16 – 23 July because nothing seem to be getting done the real issue started at that failed expansion and following factory reset which left me with a useless device.

Once Netgear finally agreed to replace my device they did it quickly. They shipped priority overnight and even included a prepaid FEDEX ground label for return. I wish they would have done this before I had to wipe my device. This seemed like an obvious hardware error and not anything related to software, then again I’m not a Netgear technician looking at logs.

They upgraded my hardware from v1 to v2 this is big as v2 offers support for 3Tb drives in all slots and DDR3 memory as well as more memory slots. Not that I currently have any 3Tb but have that option now in the future.

For an enterprise device all this powering down to test, reinstalling firmware, etc is unacceptable. We buy enterprise class devices for uptime. Had my EqualLogic SAN been down for this long grave consequences would have transpired. Luckily I don't have any server ISCSI targets on this device.

During this whole snafu I think I had a total of 4 support tickets. This seem hardly efficient. Why not just let one support ticket follow you all the way through the process. Since tickets 2-4 were all initiated via phone I have no record of communication other than phone calls, notes and emails. How about keeping all this documentation together even after this is handed off to level 2 and/or level 3 support.

It seemed like passing off from level 1 to level 2 I had to explain everything all over again. Doesn’t anyone read notes? Keeping the same support ticket through the life of the problem would probably solve this.

Obviously several events led to the long support life of this incident. I can’t fault Netgear for my non-working days or failed PRI circuit mucking up communication. However, I think this issue could have been handled in a manner more consistent with a 9k product. Look at my logs if you don’t see anything strange remote in to the device and look around. If a known good drive works in slots 10-12 but not 9 this is a hardware problem. Replace hardware. If slot 9 randomly spins up with different hard drives this is a hardware problem. Replace hardware. Don’t make me jump through a bunch of scripted hoops all the while leaving my data in jeopardy.

Will I buy another Netgear ReadyNAS product? At this point only for non-critical access and personal use
Do I trust it for mission critical ISCI targets? Right now I personally would be very afraid to use with Hyper-V or VMWare
Do I trust it to use for SMB shares that my end users need daily access to? Not currently
Can Netgear help allay my distrust of this product? Yes over all this is a great product I just think some issues on timing and how tech support is run, "you need to do a factory default reset" should never be an answer to a hardware problem

I realize a NAS is not a backup solution and I keep data rsynced to another ReadyNAS and replicated to another ReadyNAS.

I also realize that the ReadyNAS products I manage and own are designed for storage applications. If they fail to perform the most basic tasks they are designed to do there is a problem. If when they fail and support must be called and support can’t correct the afore mentioned problem causing loss of basic functionality in a timely manner there is a problem.