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Forum Discussion
RN104 eSATA Issues #24305721
Hi everyone, I have several ReadyNAS units at work (some Ultra/Plus units and an RN314).
I just purchased an RN104 for home use, and am having issues getting it to work with an external eSATA enclosure.
I initiated a support chat session #141203-000560. Stephanie kindly spent a lot of time with me and tried her best, but we could not reach a solution.
The chat seems to have generated three case ID#'s 24305698, 24305700, and 24305721.
Another poster experienced a very similar issue here:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=73599
The Setup:
After purchase, I immediately upgraded the RN104 to 6.2.0 (I like the disk spin down). It currently has one WD10EFRX in it while I experiment. I've tried both FlexRAID and xRAID modes.
My external enclosure is a Mediasonic 2 bay with USB 3.0 and eSATA. It is populated with another WD10EFRX and a ST3000DM001.
http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1398380591
My intent was to connect the enclosure to the RN104 preferably via eSATA, and have its drive/s accessible as external storage.
This enclosure has several modes (individual disks, spanning, RAID 0, RAID 1) and supports eSATA port multiplier.
When in individual mode, the enclosure presents both disks to the host controller as they are with no manipulation (two discrete disks).
This mode requires USB drivers that support multi disks, or an eSATA controller that supports port multiplier. All other modes present the two disks as a single volume.
The enclosure works perfectly in all modes over USB 3.0 to my Windows 7 and 8.1 machines.
It also works when connected to my Netgear R7500 Nighthawk router via both USB and eSATA.
The R7500 can only see the first disk when in individual mode. It apparently lacks multi-disk USB drivers and port multiplier, but it at least works and provides verification that the enclosure works via eSATA to a Netgear device.
The Issue:
With the enclosure in individual mode and both drives formatted to NTFS, connecting to the RN104 via eSATA both hot or prior to boot has the following results:
The 104 notifies that external storage is connected and confirms in the log that port multiplier is enabled and it sees the correct disk serial# on the enclosure's two SATA channels.
On the admin Volumes page below the graphic of the NAS, it shows a graphic of a 5-bay Netgear EDA500 expansion chassis. This is not what I have, and the EDA500 is supposedly not supported by the RN100 series, but it's just a graphic, so no big deal yet.
The Performance page shows both drives in the enclosure with green dots. Hovering over the dots yields the correct drive info.
Back on the Volumes page, I can select both new drives and create volumes. I can see the volumes in the shares tab and my Windows machine and read and write to them.
Oddly, new options for the disk in the 104 are now available, such as expand volume. (the NAS is currently in FlexRAID, I didn't see that option when in xRAID). You might expect an option like this if you had say an RN314 with an EDA500, so this is kinda funny. But all I want to do is access the drives as external storage, so I didn't try expanding.
The big problem is, that the above must be done very quickly. Within 1-2 minutes of the enclosure being connected or the NAS booted, the NAS becomes unresponsive and no shares are accessible at all, including the NAS drive itself. If I just connect the enclosure and let it sit for a minute without trying to add the shares, it still becomes unresponsive. The same happens no matter what mode the enclosure is in.
When this hang occurs, you can still do some things. You can click through the admin pages, but the green dots for the new drives on the performance tab have gone black. Hovering over them just gives you a blank window with the busy swirl. The main NAS drive is still green, but you get a busy swirl for it too. You can't go into any shares or folders, and you get busy swirls next to everything on the settings page. The NAS will not power off or reboot from the main page or power switch. The only way to get it back is to pull the power plug.
You can still SSH to the NAS and do stuff. However, some disk related things such as gdisk and parted do not respond and sometimes cause the session to hang. If I connect the drives and SSH after the NAS hangs, I can see that it has identified the drives (NAS drive is sda, enclosure drives are sdb and sdc) but it won't let me mount them using mount -t ntfs.
This is very frustrating since it works for a couple minutes, leading me to believe that it is quite capable of doing what I want. It's just that something is interfering. Some leftover code that is causing the NAS to think my enclosure is an EDA500 perhaps? I researched eSATA support for this unit prior to purchase, but found very little other than it supports eSATA external storage.
There's got to be a way to fix this so it just works with standard eSATA port multiplier. What can I do via SSH to figure out what's going on?
Another option is of course to use USB. The enclosure does work via USB, but like my R7500 the NAS only sees the first drive. I have started a new thread to explore this USB issue as well as how to get the USB port to enter sleep mode:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=78981
Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
I just purchased an RN104 for home use, and am having issues getting it to work with an external eSATA enclosure.
I initiated a support chat session #141203-000560. Stephanie kindly spent a lot of time with me and tried her best, but we could not reach a solution.
The chat seems to have generated three case ID#'s 24305698, 24305700, and 24305721.
Another poster experienced a very similar issue here:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=73599
The Setup:
After purchase, I immediately upgraded the RN104 to 6.2.0 (I like the disk spin down). It currently has one WD10EFRX in it while I experiment. I've tried both FlexRAID and xRAID modes.
My external enclosure is a Mediasonic 2 bay with USB 3.0 and eSATA. It is populated with another WD10EFRX and a ST3000DM001.
http://www.mediasonic.ca/product.php?id=1398380591
My intent was to connect the enclosure to the RN104 preferably via eSATA, and have its drive/s accessible as external storage.
This enclosure has several modes (individual disks, spanning, RAID 0, RAID 1) and supports eSATA port multiplier.
When in individual mode, the enclosure presents both disks to the host controller as they are with no manipulation (two discrete disks).
This mode requires USB drivers that support multi disks, or an eSATA controller that supports port multiplier. All other modes present the two disks as a single volume.
The enclosure works perfectly in all modes over USB 3.0 to my Windows 7 and 8.1 machines.
It also works when connected to my Netgear R7500 Nighthawk router via both USB and eSATA.
The R7500 can only see the first disk when in individual mode. It apparently lacks multi-disk USB drivers and port multiplier, but it at least works and provides verification that the enclosure works via eSATA to a Netgear device.
The Issue:
With the enclosure in individual mode and both drives formatted to NTFS, connecting to the RN104 via eSATA both hot or prior to boot has the following results:
The 104 notifies that external storage is connected and confirms in the log that port multiplier is enabled and it sees the correct disk serial# on the enclosure's two SATA channels.
On the admin Volumes page below the graphic of the NAS, it shows a graphic of a 5-bay Netgear EDA500 expansion chassis. This is not what I have, and the EDA500 is supposedly not supported by the RN100 series, but it's just a graphic, so no big deal yet.
The Performance page shows both drives in the enclosure with green dots. Hovering over the dots yields the correct drive info.
Back on the Volumes page, I can select both new drives and create volumes. I can see the volumes in the shares tab and my Windows machine and read and write to them.
Oddly, new options for the disk in the 104 are now available, such as expand volume. (the NAS is currently in FlexRAID, I didn't see that option when in xRAID). You might expect an option like this if you had say an RN314 with an EDA500, so this is kinda funny. But all I want to do is access the drives as external storage, so I didn't try expanding.
The big problem is, that the above must be done very quickly. Within 1-2 minutes of the enclosure being connected or the NAS booted, the NAS becomes unresponsive and no shares are accessible at all, including the NAS drive itself. If I just connect the enclosure and let it sit for a minute without trying to add the shares, it still becomes unresponsive. The same happens no matter what mode the enclosure is in.
When this hang occurs, you can still do some things. You can click through the admin pages, but the green dots for the new drives on the performance tab have gone black. Hovering over them just gives you a blank window with the busy swirl. The main NAS drive is still green, but you get a busy swirl for it too. You can't go into any shares or folders, and you get busy swirls next to everything on the settings page. The NAS will not power off or reboot from the main page or power switch. The only way to get it back is to pull the power plug.
You can still SSH to the NAS and do stuff. However, some disk related things such as gdisk and parted do not respond and sometimes cause the session to hang. If I connect the drives and SSH after the NAS hangs, I can see that it has identified the drives (NAS drive is sda, enclosure drives are sdb and sdc) but it won't let me mount them using mount -t ntfs.
This is very frustrating since it works for a couple minutes, leading me to believe that it is quite capable of doing what I want. It's just that something is interfering. Some leftover code that is causing the NAS to think my enclosure is an EDA500 perhaps? I researched eSATA support for this unit prior to purchase, but found very little other than it supports eSATA external storage.
There's got to be a way to fix this so it just works with standard eSATA port multiplier. What can I do via SSH to figure out what's going on?
Another option is of course to use USB. The enclosure does work via USB, but like my R7500 the NAS only sees the first drive. I have started a new thread to explore this USB issue as well as how to get the USB port to enter sleep mode:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=78981
Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
15 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Just noticed this for 6.2.1-RC1/RC2
15. [RC1] Skip EFI System Partitions when mounting external storage.
What's the reason behind this change? Could it have any effect? - Last night I tried 6.2.1-RC2...no change. I also tried formatting the drives to ext4, issue still occurs. I was able to use the admin interface to format them before the NAS locked up...this is so close to working, but some process is hanging after a period of time, how can I identify what it is?
Can anyone in support please elaborate on this issue? The rep mentioned she had other reports of this issue and that upper tier was aware of it.
What's causing this? - Hi IndyMag,
ReadyNASOS 6.2.1-RC3 has been posted. Kindly give it a try and it might help. Here is the link below:
viewtopic.php?f=154&t=78866
Kindly post the results and your observations. IndyMag wrote: Just noticed this for 6.2.1-RC1/RC2 15. [RC1] Skip EFI System Partitions when mounting external storage.
What's the reason behind this change? Could it have any effect?
Skips trying to mount a small partition on a disk that we shouldn't mount. As the EFI system partition is the first partition mounting it breaks some backup jobs.- Thanks for the suggestion Ixa.
Unfortunately the issue remains with 6.2.1-RC3. - Thanks for the info mdgm, I'm wondering if you can shed some light on this issue.
It appears that the issue is related to the fact that the EDA500 expansion chassis does not currently work with the RN104.
It's my understanding that the EDA500 is a "dumb" port multiplier enclosure intended for NAS volume expansion. The RN104 seems to think that my generic enclosure is an EDA500 and attempts to initiate the volume expansion features that apparently don't work on the RN104.
My original intent was to connect the enclosure to use as external storage, not volume expansion. But this volume expansion limitation is preventing it.
What is the nature of this limitation? Would it be possible to correct, allowing enclosures like the EDA500 to work with the RN104 for external storage and/or volume expansion?
Alternatively, since volume expansion is not currently supported, can the leftover volume expansion code causing the hang be eliminated or disabled? Then allowing multi drive enclosures to be connected for external storage only?
Thanks - What happens if you switch to flexraid?
- Most of my attempts have been with the unit in FLEXraid mode. So I just experimented some more in both modes. I only have one drive in the RN104 at the moment, two drives in the external enclosure.
Mostly the behavior is the same in either mode with a few subtle differences.
The following occurs the same in either raid mode:
The hang occurs within a few seconds to a minute after hot plugging the enclosure or booting with the enclosure connected.
When hot plugging the RN104 only sees the first drive in the enclosure.
When booting with the enclosure connected, the RN104 sees both drives in the encolosure.
The detected drives are shown in red on the admin volumes page (in a graphic of the EDA500) with a message stating that inactive drives must be removed to use the newly detected drives.
The drive settings box on the left side of the volumes page only has the DESTROY option available for the two enclosure drives.
If I DESTROY them, the drives go from red to black in the graphic on the volumes page.
The following are the differences observed in the two modes:
In FLEXraid, when the drives are black I can select them and have both options to the right: FORMAT and NEW VOLUME. I believe that one time I was able to get it to complete a format before the hang. If I don't format and the drive is already NTFS, I can click NEW VOLUME, name the volume and see it in shares before it hangs.
In X-raid and the above scenario, only the FORMAT option is available, NEW VOLUME is grayed out. I attempted to do a format once and received an error code message after the format attempt. I don't recall the error code, it's very difficult to reproduce some of these situations since most of the time the system hangs before I can do anything, then requiring a hard reset.
In FLEXraid when the enclosure drives are black, new options are available for the internal NAS volume: ADD PARITY and EXPAND VOLUME. I haven't tried this since it's not what I want to do anyway and surely wouldn't succeed before the system hangs.
In Xraid, no new options were available for the internal NAS drive. This is kind of odd and almost seems backwards since I would have expected Xraid to have more flexible expansion options.
Thanks again for the help. - What you want to do is prevent expansion, and access the disks in jbod mode. if the RN104 is confused about these drives being external (which I think it is), then flexraid would be the obvious thing to try.
But you've done that... Did you select one drive at a time when you said "new volume". Also, I think "new" means "new" it would end up btrfs, and not ntfs. - Correct, I don't want expansion. What I meant by my last statement was that It surprised me that expand volume options were available in flexraid instead of in xraid.
I did select one drive at a time.
Also, I think you're right. The destroy and new volume operations (although I can't recall if it said new volume or add volume) seem to have done something to the file system on that drive. If I plug the enclosure back into my Windows machine, what was originally a single NTFS partition is now split in three (two small, one large) partitions and the file system is not recognized by windows.
I'm going to take the enclosure to work and see what it does on the RN314 that I have there just out of curiosity.
Thanks
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