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Forum Discussion
RN104 eSATA port
I'm having some trouble working out how to set up an eSATA enclosure so it works with the RN104. I currently have the 104 with 1 4TB drive installed, and that works beautifully. My Lian-Li EX-50 is at...
I've done a bit more testing and found out some stuff (some of which might be considered obvious, but I will list it).
If you plug a device via USB into the RN104 and it detects the drive and successfully mounts it, it will appear in the interface under System > Overview and it will look like an additional drive with a few extra options for unmounting it. I cannot confirm if this is the same for ESATA, but I think it safe to presume it would be.
I removed all drives bar one from my external ESATA enclosure and powered it on. The RN104 detected it and under System > Volumes it displayed a diagram of an external enclosure with 5 HDD slots. It indicated that it was an EDA500XXX which is not correct, but still let me interact with the external enclosure. The power button will no longer cause the display to turn on, and several pages within the administration console will no longer respond (System > Volumes and all other tabs. System > Overview, Settings and Logs all display data, though some of it is erroneous as it indicated all the HDDs were running at -1 degree celsius). It would not allow me to access the disk and gave an error "Please remove inactive volumes in order to use the disk. Disk #1." I selected the new drive that was listed on System > Volumes and told it to destroy the existing partition. It did this, but upon attempting to create a new volume it stopped responding. It appeared to be responding to this request, but went nowhere and the drive does not have a volume on it.
I spoke with Netgear Support and we ran through a bunch of different permutations of my hardware trying to identify the issue. I wish I caught the gentlemans name at the start of the call, as he was very helpful, and is escalating the issue to the engineering team to identify exactly what the ESATA port supports. He referred to the forums when he was searching on the issue, so I'm guessing that there is not a confirmed list of devices which are compatiable.
I must admit that it is somewhat frustrating that this is so difficult a problem to solve. Plugging a USB device into the port on the front of the 104 is so seamless from a user perspective, it's really painful trying to kluge a solution just to be able to read and write to JBOD volumes via the ESATA. I will update this thread further when I hear back from Netgear (hopefully with a step-by-step solution).
If you plug a device via USB into the RN104 and it detects the drive and successfully mounts it, it will appear in the interface under System > Overview and it will look like an additional drive with a few extra options for unmounting it. I cannot confirm if this is the same for ESATA, but I think it safe to presume it would be.
I removed all drives bar one from my external ESATA enclosure and powered it on. The RN104 detected it and under System > Volumes it displayed a diagram of an external enclosure with 5 HDD slots. It indicated that it was an EDA500XXX which is not correct, but still let me interact with the external enclosure. The power button will no longer cause the display to turn on, and several pages within the administration console will no longer respond (System > Volumes and all other tabs. System > Overview, Settings and Logs all display data, though some of it is erroneous as it indicated all the HDDs were running at -1 degree celsius). It would not allow me to access the disk and gave an error "Please remove inactive volumes in order to use the disk. Disk #1." I selected the new drive that was listed on System > Volumes and told it to destroy the existing partition. It did this, but upon attempting to create a new volume it stopped responding. It appeared to be responding to this request, but went nowhere and the drive does not have a volume on it.
I spoke with Netgear Support and we ran through a bunch of different permutations of my hardware trying to identify the issue. I wish I caught the gentlemans name at the start of the call, as he was very helpful, and is escalating the issue to the engineering team to identify exactly what the ESATA port supports. He referred to the forums when he was searching on the issue, so I'm guessing that there is not a confirmed list of devices which are compatiable.
I must admit that it is somewhat frustrating that this is so difficult a problem to solve. Plugging a USB device into the port on the front of the 104 is so seamless from a user perspective, it's really painful trying to kluge a solution just to be able to read and write to JBOD volumes via the ESATA. I will update this thread further when I hear back from Netgear (hopefully with a step-by-step solution).
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