Hi all, We still have a large number of old 2100 units at our car dealerships for backup purposes and I did visit one of these dealers today to physically move one of his servers. These servers usually run various backup routines via NFS to the 2100 nightly, so I attempted a login. No go. I ran the RAIDar discovery and found the unit somehow resetted itself to DHCP and failing to find a server, set itself up to 192.168.168.168. So I reconfigured the network settings and logged in. No shares, no volumes. Clicked on the drives button lower right and found drives 2 and 3 dead, drives one and four with SMART warnings in the log. I have the following questions: Has anyone had a similar experience with a 2100 losing its network configuration and just "resetting" itself? The drives (that were still alive) had about 66K hours or close to 8 years (WD 500GB Enterprise) in the SMART data. I always paced server drives at about 5 years - is that still correct? The dealer would be prepared to spend the $$$ on new drives. I could not test the basic operation of the 2100 with the failed drives though. After removing the two dead candidates, the system would still not let me build a new volume as it did not "see" the 2 drives. Does the 2100 only operate with 4 drives installed or should one healthy drive be sufficient to let the system build a volume? Thank you in advance for your input and best regards from Germany, vmanns.

vmanns wrote: The drives (that were still alive) had about 66K hours or close to 8 years (WD 500GB Enterprise) in the SMART data. I always paced server drives at about 5 years - is that still correct? Backblaze uses consumer drives, and found that 80% were still in service after 4 years. Their projections say that 50% would still be in service after 6 years (and they see a annual failure rate of about 11% after 4). I don't how this compares with enterprise class. vmanns wrote:After removing the two dead candidates, the system would still not let me build a new volume as it did not "see" the 2 drives. Does the 2100 only operate with 4 drives installed or should one healthy drive be sufficient to let the system build a volume? The NAS can create a jbod volume with one drive, and RAID-1 volume with two. If you were trying to create RAID-5 (flexraid), then of course you would need at least three. vmanns wrote:Has anyone had a similar experience with a 2100 losing its network configuration and just "resetting" itself? That is unusual. If someone accidentally did an OS reinstall, then the network config would be reset to DHCP and the admin password would be reset to netgear1. If the OS partition became full, then the NAS configuration can become corrupted. Possible I guess, and that could explain why the volume can't rebuild. You could try a factory reset with just the two working disks installed.

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vmanns

Aspirant

Oct 09, 2018

Solved

ReadyNAS 2100 failed drives

Hi all,

We still have a large number of old 2100 units at our car dealerships for backup purposes and I did visit one of these dealers today to physically move one of his servers. These servers usually run various backup routines via NFS to the 2100 nightly, so I attempted a login. No go.

I ran the RAIDar discovery and found the unit somehow resetted itself to DHCP and failing to find a server, set itself up to 192.168.168.168.

So I reconfigured the network settings and logged in. No shares, no volumes. Clicked on the drives button lower right and found drives 2 and 3 dead, drives one and four with SMART warnings in the log.

I have the following questions:

Has anyone had a similar experience with a 2100 losing its network configuration and just "resetting" itself?
The drives (that were still alive) had about 66K hours or close to 8 years (WD 500GB Enterprise) in the SMART data. I always paced server drives at about 5 years - is that still correct?
The dealer would be prepared to spend the $$$ on new drives. I could not test the basic operation of the 2100 with the failed drives though. After removing the two dead candidates, the system would still not let me build a new volume as it did not "see" the 2 drives. Does the 2100 only operate with 4 drives installed or should one healthy drive be sufficient to let the system build a volume?

Thank you in advance for your input and best regards from Germany,

vmanns.

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StephenB
Oct 09, 2018
vmanns wrote:

The drives (that were still alive) had about 66K hours or close to 8 years (WD 500GB Enterprise) in the SMART data. I always paced server drives at about 5 years - is that still correct?

Backblaze uses consumer drives, and found that 80% were still in service after 4 years. Their projections say that 50% would still be in service after 6 years (and they see a annual failure rate of about 11% after 4). I don't how this compares with enterprise class.

vmanns wrote:After removing the two dead candidates, the system would still not let me build a new volume as it did not "see" the 2 drives. Does the 2100 only operate with 4 drives installed or should one healthy drive be sufficient to let the system build a volume?

The NAS can create a jbod volume with one drive, and RAID-1 volume with two. If you were trying to create RAID-5 (flexraid), then of course you would need at least three.

vmanns wrote:Has anyone had a similar experience with a 2100 losing its network configuration and just "resetting" itself?

That is unusual. If someone accidentally did an OS reinstall, then the network config would be reset to DHCP and the admin password would be reset to netgear1.

If the OS partition became full, then the NAS configuration can become corrupted. Possible I guess, and that could explain why the volume can't rebuild.

You could try a factory reset with just the two working disks installed.

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StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Oct 09, 2018
vmanns wrote:

The drives (that were still alive) had about 66K hours or close to 8 years (WD 500GB Enterprise) in the SMART data. I always paced server drives at about 5 years - is that still correct?

Backblaze uses consumer drives, and found that 80% were still in service after 4 years. Their projections say that 50% would still be in service after 6 years (and they see a annual failure rate of about 11% after 4). I don't how this compares with enterprise class.

vmanns wrote:After removing the two dead candidates, the system would still not let me build a new volume as it did not "see" the 2 drives. Does the 2100 only operate with 4 drives installed or should one healthy drive be sufficient to let the system build a volume?

The NAS can create a jbod volume with one drive, and RAID-1 volume with two. If you were trying to create RAID-5 (flexraid), then of course you would need at least three.

vmanns wrote:Has anyone had a similar experience with a 2100 losing its network configuration and just "resetting" itself?

That is unusual. If someone accidentally did an OS reinstall, then the network config would be reset to DHCP and the admin password would be reset to netgear1.

If the OS partition became full, then the NAS configuration can become corrupted. Possible I guess, and that could explain why the volume can't rebuild.

You could try a factory reset with just the two working disks installed.
- vmanns
  Aspirant
  Oct 09, 2018
  Thanks Steven,
  
  that really helps. :smileyhappy:
  
  One last question:
  If I interpret the ReadyNas HDD compatability list correctly, the 2100 is officially limited to 3GB drives. Is there an "unofficial" limit for larger drives?
  
  Best regards,
  
  Volker
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Oct 10, 2018
    vmanns wrote:
    
    If I interpret the ReadyNas HDD compatability list correctly, the 2100 is officially limited to 3GB drives. Is there an "unofficial" limit for larger drives?
    
    Netgear stopped updating the HCL for the legacy NAS a long time ago, which makes it of limited value. I always recommend going with either NAS-purposed drives (WDC Red, Seagate Ironwolf) or enterprise class. Those should work reliably in any NAS.
    
    OS 4.2.x systems can accept larger drives, but there are some limits related to volume size. The volume size max is 16 TiB; and you cannot expand a volume more than 8 TiB from it's original size. Note that both limits apply to the delivered volume size, not the raw disk capacity. The XRAID volume size formula is "sum the disks and subtract the largest". So 4x5TB will work; you can get a bit higher if you mix disk sizes (3x6TB+5TB for instance).
    
    OS 6 systems don't have these limits, and it is possible to convert your NAS to run OS 6. It is not supported by Netgear, but many people here have done it. The process is destructive, so you'll need to restore the data from backup.