ReadyNas 6.2 (NAS locks up entirely)

Hello everyone,

I am also a victim of this problem.

Everyone here, please understand that I want the manufacturer to do something about this and I applaud all of you that have been trying resolve this, testing beta releases, posting statuses, and basically trying to do the right thing.

This is a huge problem, 18 pages of posts, over 10,000 views, and still no viable resolution.

My ReadyNAS104 ran fine for months without a single issue and one of my other 2 ReadyNAS machines is also a RN104 and has been in a production environment for almost a year without an issue (which is why I bought one for the house). The only difference is the F/W version.
The one in production has not been updated to 6.2.x (thankfully).
I updated the one at the house to 6.2.2 recently and based on what I've read, that's where we all went wrong.

Configuration:
RN104 w/(4) 2TB drives
Both NICs connected using CAT5e to a NETGEAR GS-108 (Gigabit switch) each with a static IP address
No USB or eSATA connections
recently set the drives to spin down after 30 minutes

Environment:
My primary use (at home) is for media storage/streaming where the NAS is access by Roku boxes, Smart TVs, tablets (Surface RT Win8.1), a couple of PCs running Win7 Pro w/SP1 (64-bit), and Windows Home Server 2011 (aka Server 2008 R2 "lite").

My secondary use is for work where I have Server 2012R physical host running the Hyper-V role that uses the NAS as an iSCSI target for a single LUN (2TB allocated) of which only a single 1TB volume is actually in place to store a single VHD (100GB - fixed - not dynamic - note: do not put dynamic virtual disks on a NAS unless you want a new definition of slow and unreliable) for one VM that is also running Server 2012 R2.

Manifestation of the problem:
While I wasn't watching the NAS at the exact time this problem started, I did notice that there was an entry in the event log on the Server that the iSCSI connection was not able to reconnect. I have had this problem before only when the physical host gets rebooted and for some reason or another the iSCSI initiator does not reconnect to the iSCSI target automatically if using CHAP. On the iSCSI initiator GUI it will indicate that it is "reconnecting" but it isn't so you have to select "disconnect" wait for it to go to "inactive" then establish the connection using the advanced properties, select CHAP, enter the credentials, click 'OK' a couple of times and the status is now "connected" and everything is right with the world. This time was different, the connection had already been established and was working but got dropped for some reason this time not on the initiator side (i.e. the physical host was not restarted).

Shortly after, I was on my Win7 workstation trying to upload some photos to the NAS (which is setup as a library location in Win7) and I noticed that Windows Explorer was taking forever to load the directory structure after the 3rd or 4th time I accessed it and then it just went to a tree structure showing a partial contents of the share...the NAS was hung.

Steps performed:
I went to the server and disconnected the iSCSI initiator via the GUI an waited for it to go inactive so now the server was disconnected from the NAS.
From the Win7 workstation I removed the drive mappings to the shares on the NAS and remove the pointer in the libraries i.e. Pictures, Videos, etc... so now the workstation was no longer connected to the NAS.

Once all the connections to the NAS were closed/disconnected, I attempted a graceful shutdown and it hung on "Shutting down".
Waited for 5 hours (usually takes about a minute for it shutdown).
Hard power down for a minute then powered it back up then it was on the "Rebooting..." hang for 12 hours.
The only thing that had changed was the firmware, the static IP for each NIC from DHCP, and setting the drives to spin down after 30 minutes,
I tried to reinstall the OS using the boot menu and that hung.
I was able to boot to the Technical Support mode.
And now I've got the unit sitting at "DebugMode[62304]"

The fact that I have another one of these that has been on 24x7 for about a year (and it still is) but it has a different version of the F/W tells me that the F/W is most likely the problem.

NETGEAR F/W development team and software quality assurance team, I hope you are working on a solution for this.

At the very least you should provide a mechanism for us to revert to a stable version of the F/W without having to lose our data (5 days to format mine and reload from original source) and I'll still lose hundreds of hours of encoding time not to mention my confidence in your products and support. I have now spent the last 7 hours dealing with your less than helpful support staff, posting my product review on Amazon, and my experience on Facebook. I would love to retract/update my posts with a positive resolution from a company whose products I have believed in for many years. At the very least get involved with the group that was responsible for releasing this "Alpha" F/W version as production ready.