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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
- Three partitions suggests the the NAS also is creating OS/Swap partitions. That confirms that the NAS is treating the drives as internal.
- A new support ticket has been opened on this issue.
Case #24365783 - Last night I tried the drive enclosure on a RN314 and tested it with firmware 6.1.8 and 6.2.0 in FLEXraid
Over eSATA it functions exactly as you would expect it to work with the EDA500 expansion chassis. The 314 sees both enclosure drives when hot plugged. The GUI on the 314 remained stable and did not hang like the 104 did.
I could create new volumes, format, and even expand the existing NAS volume. It does appear that it is treating the enclosure as NAS volume expansion and formatting the drives to btrfs as StephenB correctly postulated. There were no options available for formatting to other file systems, or for mounting the drives as external storage (what I'm looking to do). It seems the 314 (and the 104 before it hangs) simply assume that you want to do internal expansion when it sees a multi-drive, port multiplier enclosure. It would be nice if you could choose between expansion or external storage.
At least this confirms no hang on the 314, and that the enclosure is working properly.
The mystery remains as to why the RN104 hangs, and if it's possible to fix the hang and/or add the option for mounting multi-eSATA drives as external storage.
Perhaps if the hang can be avoided then the drives could be mounted as external via SSH?
I also tested the enclosure on the 314 via USB and discovered a difference in how the two models handle multi-enclosures over USB.
USB was the other option for getting this enclosure to work with the 104. I'll add that info to the USB thread I started here:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=78981 - Just tried with 6.2.2 and things are improving...
eSATA no longer hangs the GUI trying to expand. Now shows the first drive as external storage, but does not show the second drive.
USB behavior is improved as well. To keep things simple, I'll post further developments on both the eSATA and USB issues in the other thread:
viewtopic.php?f=65&t=78981 - Above I reported that eSATA was only showing the first drive in the enclosure with 6.2.2
After trying eSATA some more, it is showing both drives on hot plug and boot. Not sure what the problem was before, but it does appear to be working with 6.2.2
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