Readynas 104 drops out when copying to it

I downgraded to 6.1.3 , and seems to be not locking up but the Copy speed is 20Kb/s on a gigabit network , very Slow... It's got to better than that , frustrated RN104 user ,,,,

I did a 2nd copy of 30GB from a SSD drive to the RN104 inside "Network Computers" it has a speed of 600Kb/s to 1.5 Mb/s Not very Good it's calculation is 11 Hours

Ok, nevermind this last larger copy Locked up the RN104 NAS , about .5 GB into this last copy ......

and now for an add from ........>

NETGEAR LAUNCHES WORLD’S FASTEST DESKTOP NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE DEVICE

Leveraging the revolutionary ReadyNAS operating system, ReadyNAS 716 features advanced data protection, rapid file transfer and unique capabilities for simultaneous HD streaming.

What an irony - why the support ask me to factory reset it if it will hit the same problem eventually, and a future firmware upgrade of 6.1.5 will require another hard reset? Netgear seemed to have to much time at their hands, and assume we the product users have that much time too ...

I got a reply today they said an update of 6.1.5 will fix the issue, but they told me to factory reset anyway for the time being...

perkij wrote:

io2002oi wrote: I had the same problem - stuck and NAS went offline when copying 800Mb+ file into the NAS (40% full). The support eventually told me to factory reset. Really they should provide the reason why it behave this way (as I need to assess it whether it should be used in a "real world" environment) and to avoid it in case after factory reset it hit the same problem again. You haven't worked it out already from this post... AVOID AVOID AVOID. This product is not suitable in any world let alone a real one. IT DOES NOT WORK AND WILL FAIL. You will also note from a comment from someone in the know on here, that IF and WHEN they do fix it with the next firmware, YOU will HAVE to do yet ANOTHER firmware reset in order to fix it!

Did they say when ? cause I'm still waiting ;)
Reset is not an option, but that's just their best bet, it gives a clean software slate (and that's free for them). I'm pretty sure if the problem wasn't on a big scale, if you tell them you did it and still have the problem, you would have another device in less than a week, then they would have gotten everything covered, hardware and software in just 2 steps and with no headaches.
I already did 3 resets, 4 reinstall and 1 scrub with no effect, so I don't think a reset will help you. I personally checked every bit of my complicated network installation, my disks, formatted my OS X client, tried under Windows, via wireless or gigabit ethernet, NIC bonding activated or not, via AFP or SMB, antivirus and snapshots on or off... I didn't even fill in a ticket for that knowing they wouldn't be of any help and ask me to do all the checking again and reset another time (and I don't really want to explain them what is a VLAN, a layer 7 firewall or to teach them Linux). The support is just useless until engineers get the update out, not their fault but they have some pressure to close the maximum number of cases, so if a factory reset has even 0.5% chance to fix the problem, they'll ask for it.

They didn't say when the next firmware is out, and really this is quite a serious issue for Netgear and their product RN104. The primary purpose of a NAS is to store files. what's the point of it if it cannot do just that.
the support say: "both nodesize and leafsize will be increased to 32k" and it will fix the issue.

Now I want to know if I can do this by myself after factory reset ?

xeltros wrote:

Did they say when ? cause I'm still waiting ;) Reset is not an option, but that's just their best bet, it gives a clean software slate (and that's free for them). I'm pretty sure if the problem wasn't on a big scale, if you tell them you did it and still have the problem, you would have another device in less than a week, then they would have gotten everything covered, hardware and software in just 2 steps and with no headaches. I already did 3 resets, 4 reinstall and 1 scrub with no effect, so I don't think a reset will help you. I personally checked every bit of my complicated network installation, my disks, formatted my OS X client, tried under Windows, via wireless or gigabit ethernet, NIC bonding activated or not, via AFP or SMB, antivirus and snapshots on or off... I didn't even fill in a ticket for that knowing they wouldn't be of any help and ask me to do all the checking again and reset another time (and I don't really want to explain them what is a VLAN, a layer 7 firewall or to teach them Linux). The support is just useless until engineers get the update out, not their fault but they have some pressure to close the maximum number of cases, so if a factory reset has even 0.5% chance to fix the problem, they'll ask for it.

It's possible the firmware update might be needed to support making filesystems/mounting them with the new feature. Otherwise one would think they could have offered to make a new volume manually for you. Would not be surprised at all if for this reason once you update to 6.1.5 you can't go back.

What you should understand is that current Netgear firmware is too old to support this size change in BTRFS configuration. Everything you need is to update the BTRFS driver and convert your BTRFS volumes. Once converted the BTRFS will only be readable by something which has the support for reading that particular configuration, meaning actual Netgear firmware won't be able to. it would be like asking windows 3.1 to read 4Tbytes NTFS drives.

As far as I know you can do it by yourself, but that's really risky.
=> I think BTRFS driver is in the kernel, meaning you'll have to compile the kernel with linux official sources (or at least play a little with initrd depending how Netgear integrated the driver)
=> then boot on it (but kernel compilation is never risk free, usually you got grub coming to rescue but with no video out...)
=> create a volume with the good parameters (meaning shrinking the existing volume before)
=> move data from one volume to the other, shrink as many times as needed depending on the available space
=> then edit the FSTAB
=> check if everything's all right
=> delete the old volume
=> extend the new volume
=> try a reboot just to be sure you won't have any surprise after a power outage.
if you try after a factory reset, all the shrink/extend/move thing is unnecessary, just delete and recreate the volume with new parameters, I believe parameters are passed while formatting so you should only have one command to send, but you'll still need a good kernel before.

So possible, but not really safe and far from easy if you're not a linux admin. And guess what, not supported by Netgear of course. So if you run into trouble and need help, you'll be alone. So I really DON'T ADVISE to do this unless you know what you are doing and do some background checks on what I said to be sure.

As said by mdgm, going back from 6.1.5 shouldn't be possible, you would end up with an unreadable data partition (and maybe system if they convert it too). But if you are into it, the manual kernel update should allow you to read the data partition again after the downgrade, this admitting the firmware boots in the first place (meaning system volume was not converted), if it doesn't you will be forced to factory default losing all the data.

I'm also curious on how the boot loader is handled. There are 2 ways to do it.
=> The PC way which is having a bios/EFI loading the good device, and then a boot loader on that device. This is a safe way since messing with the boot loader will be corrected by a reinstallation, made possible by booting on the flash.
=> the dumb way which is installing a unique bootloader on the flash and if you mess it too much, you won't even be able to factory reset.
I believe (and really hope) Netgear chose the first one since it's the easiest (since debian was made to do this by default) and the safest but I'd like this to be confirmed.

My understanding is that after applying the 6.1.5 upgrade you will also need to recreate the data volumes - that is, that the upgrade itself won't convert them. This is perhaps optional, but if you are seeing the lockouts you probably have no real choice.

I could be wrong on that, we'll have to wait for the release to see.

I read somewhere that those parameters are only passed by the mkfs.btrfs command, meaning no conversion is possible, but a little scripting can do the job, creating a new volume, resizing every time it's needed, moving data, updating config, deleting the old volume.
But I don't believe they will do it. First of all because it's risky since it's a long process and everyone has a different configuration (disk size, free space, file naming, file number, snapshots...) meaning every error (or power problem) would cause data loss. And if the NAS locks while copying... The NAS would be unavailable for the time (we don't want to update data while it's copied, do we ? and data already copied won't be available until the volume is mounted in the right place to avoid problems with the web interface ). It will delay the update because of all the testing needed. And since they suggest to reset for any reason, I believe they don't care about the data, so why bother doing a script ?

So I believe you are right, a volume recreation will be needed after the update, either by doing it manually via SSH, or by resetting the NAS.

LOL! You can't be serious, calling a complete failure of the device to function as a "performance issue".

For those people who are prepared to roll the dice and install the Beta, will they have to rebuild the array yet again (which will be at least the 3rd or 4th time for most people), when the full release of 6.1.5 comes out?

Will someone from Netgear be officially apologising to every person who's had the unfortunate experience of buying their product that clearly was not ready to go to market?

Hahahahahaha... they've already taken down the link to the 6.1.5 Beta! how many minutes did that last... does anyone there know what they're doing?