NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
Solved
ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing
I have had nothing but problems using my ReadyNAS 204 and 4x Seagate 8TB Archive Drives. I would have no problem with a drive failure taking two weeks to re-initialize as long as it was truely a drive failure. But since I bought all of the parts for this last December 2016, I have had maybe one month of stable running. Every one of the drives has failed at one point and as soon as I get the notification, I restart the NAS and it begins a rebuild which last nearly two weeks. It sometimes remains stable for a short while, the longest period was a week. It seems however, that writing data to the NAS triggers whatever is causing the drives to fail, and one of the drives fails again. Repeat ...
I just recently upgraded to the newest firmware 6.7.4 while it was finishing up a rebuild. It was redundant for about 3 hours and now another drive failure, I have restarted it again, and it is again rebuilding.
Please help.
Kevin
Thanks for the feedback everyone. The original issue was the failing drives. My answer was the firmware update to v6.7.4. I was just about to spend a ton of money only because I could not keep the drives from failing over and over. I use the NAS simply for storing videos and almost, if never, need to delete any files, just add to them. The Raid stripe is all the redundancy that I require and has proven reliable despite over 10 drive failures since last Xmas.
As long as the drives remain as stable as they have for the last week, even after moving new videos to it each day, I am perfectly happy with the performance of the 8TB Seagate archive drives in my ReadyNAS 204. Hopefully they won't mess anything up that fixed this problem in subsequent firmware updates (crossed fingers).
I consider this thread closed. If the drives become unstable in the future, or I need to upgrade, I will definately get NAS ready drives.
Again,
Thanks,
24 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
Archive drives are not suited for NAS use. They are intended for mostly "write once, read many" operations whereas your NAS is constantly updating configuration files, logs, etc. The drives are "failing" because it takes them too long to respond when you are overwriting things.
Maybe if you had a primary volume with standard drives and a second one with archive drives and you don't do a lot of file updating, it could work. But I wouldn't try it.
Unfortunately, you purchased an incompatible drive type, and there is no help in sight.
There's a reason why they are called ARCHIVE drives!!! They are not a normal HDD. They use what is called SMR, in its simplest terms, is a method of overlaying data tracks, much like shingles on a roof, to increase data storage density. One of the greatest aspects of SMR technology is its low cost per gigabyte
Have you had to replace a shingle on your house? It's not as simple as when you're laying new shingles onto your house. So writing onto one, not a big deal, you write and it's laying data over the top of theolder dara, layers like a Shingle. What happens where you delete something and then try to write between the layer's? It's not a fast process. Here's more on how SMR works
http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/shingled-magnetic-recoding-smr-101-basics,2-933.html#fragment-1
By the way, I have a couple of these 8TB Seagate Archive drives. I use them for what they are designed for Archive. I backup my NAS using them. Which is exacly what they are designed for. They are not a way to get mass storage on your PC or NAS for cheap. You'll have nothing but issues, which what do you know, you are having nothing but problems. There's nothing wrong with the drives other then you're trying to use them in a NAS. Something they were never deisgned to do. Go get some WD 8TB RED drives!!! Those you can use in a NAS and will work great. Of course they're more money. If you don't to keep having the issues you're having go buy the NAS drives designed for use in a NAS. Maybe you start out with just 2 of them, and later add a 3rd and then later add the 4th. I don't know if you actually need all that storage at once?
I know it was temping to use them. I just got a second one, I got it in a external Seagate case as it's like $30 cheaper then getting just a bare drive!!! But again, you can't use a SMR type HDD in a NAS or even as a main PC HDD. Those drives are perfectly fine. Use them to Backup your NAS.
A lot of others had similar issues when these drives first came onto the market. Seagate clearly states that the drives are not recommended for surveillance or NAS, but of course people often don't check out the data sheets.
JBDragon1 wrote:
Have you had to replace a shingle on your house? It's not as simple as when you're laying new shingles onto your house.
That's a perfect visualization.
Ok, thanks for the feedback. I did look around on the internet and the only drawback I saw mentioned was the length of time the raid rebuild would be in case of a drive failure. I had no problem with this. I did not however, see anything mentioned about the drives consistently failing over and over. I will replace the lot with 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro's.
By the way, the rebuild time after the update to 6.7.4 has significantly been reduced from about two weeks to just over 2 days!
Well, I was about to knuckle under and accept defeat, but ... Ever since I upgraded to v6.7.4 of the OS and after the new rebuild that only took 2 days instead of two weeks, I am happy to say that the NAS has been stable for the longest period since I bought it last Xmas. I have transferred over 1TB of data to it this weekend, which in the past, had nearly instantly triggered a drive failure. I don't want to jinx myself, but if it remains stable, then the problem was the firmware all along, wouldn't you say? I am not saying the firmware was buggy, but maybe improvements were made to accomidate slower reacting drives like my archive drives. Either way, I am going to keep my fingers crossed, and hope for the best,
Use the hard drive compatibility list in the future:
https://kb.netgear.com/20641/ReadyNAS-Hard-Disk-Compatibility-List
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
