RN104 Numerous Problems - quid pro quo #24538394

Here's a quick rundown of the state of my RN104 and how I got here. Hopefully it might help someone (but not very likely).

I had my Nas since May 2013. 3 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001.

The biggest problem I have had since the start has been the shutting down of the unit. I had a friends QNAP while he was away travelling for 18 months. During this time I did nothing with it bar use it as a file/media server. Never any issue and never even shutdown.

So when I gave him back his NAS I decided to go for an RN104. Left it on 24/7, only time I shut it down was for the regular FW updates. During these updates the NAS would need to reboot to complete, the unit would not shutdown/reboot properly and would need to be plugged out from the mains. March came around and I was greeted by a flashing blue light one morning. One of the drives had become degraded.

The drive was in warranty and was replaced. I decided to schedule the Nas to turn on and off, thinking this may add to the drives lifespan. What started happening then was a daily adrenaline rush of walking into my office to see if my Nas had either:
a: shutdown correctly (50% percent of the time)
b: hung on shutdown (50% percent of the time. "Shutting Down. Goodbye.")
c: another drive had degraded.

I had tried changing some settings like snapshots etc. which always led to short term functionality.

Each of the other 2 drives degraded and were replaced under warranty by June.

By this stage I was a little peeved and open the following the thread:
https://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=154&t=76540

You may notice I never replied to the comments in the thread, this is because a few days later I received the following PM from a Netgear employee:

Hello chrizfitz This is level 3 support from NETGEAR,to verify the shutting down issue,I would like to ask for latest system log from your side,could you please send it to me?thanks My response: Hi, Thanks for the private message. Glad to see that sort of initiative from Netgear. Please find my logs attached. Nas shutdown properly last night but not the night before. Regards, Chris

I awaited a response and I would leave The RN104 off and power on whenever I needed a file or when I saw a major update.

And then life happened. Wife and I found out we were expecting. The NAS took a back seat. During the Christmas I had another look at the Nas and updated, I had still not heard any response from the Netgear employee above. But at the same time I had not been able to do anything about it on my end.

Jan 19th 2015.
Error: degraded drive. This will be my 4th and the drives are out of warranty. Now is the time to get this sorted because in a couple of months I will not have the time to do anything about it. I contacted support with a long breakdown of the numerous issues. The operator recommended trying the Netgear employee who PM'd me as they were a higher level support agent. I did. This time I received a reply:

Sorry I missed your previous mail in Sep,from the log I don’t see any issue and the raid is redundantly with 3 health disks,the only thing may need to be changed is that the Btrfs volume was created in old ReadyOS which doesn’t include latest Btrfs enhancement,my advice is backup all the required data and create a new volume in 6.2.2.

Ok, at this point a case number was opened for me on my.netgear.com. These tickets auto close within so many days so I am constantly replying to keep it open and putting in the numerous issues I am experiencing while backing up and going back to factory defaults. I wont close it until time has shown the hanging issue has been rectified.

Here are a couple of things I noticed since I contacted support on Jan 19th and started getting ready to backup and factory restore.
-Disk Spindown worked but the disks wouldn't spin back up. NAS had to be plugged out. I turned off the the disk spindown. Although it was turned off the NAS suddenly started freezing after a certain amount of time idle. When backing up or active the NAS would be ok but idle or streaming 60-80 min the unit would freeze.
-I turned off all apps but did not uninstall them due to the latest issue with the new FW when uninstalling the apps. this did nothing.
-I wanted to delete unneeded files and media from said NAS. I trimmed down the 5TB to 3.5TB and completed the backup. The frontend and mapped drives all still showed 5TB being used.

I have updated my ticket on my.netgear.com with all of the issues above. the copy and paste reply I am getting now goes like this:

Based on the product registration, your device is no longer eligible for free assistance from a support expert. However, I want to make sure you are aware that there are other options available for you to utilize such as: * http://www.readynas.com/forum/ * http://support.netgear.com/for_business/default.aspx Aside from the above free options, I highly recommend our On Call 24/7 Contract which will entitle you to phone support for this issue and in addition you also we have our higher level of support that will assist you with your concern. Here are the OnCall 24x7 contract available for you: OnCall 24x7 1 Year, Phone Support = EUR 107 OnCall 24x7 3 Years, Phone Support = EUR 125 OnCall 24x7 5 Years, Phone Support = EUR 226 and Thank you for the response. But if you need further assistance, those are the options that are available for you so that we can proceed solving your concern. Again, thank you for choosing NETGEAR.

I am fine with this. Its their rules and frontline support aren't allowed to say otherwise. I will be continuing my ticket updates and linking it to this thread.

Last night once the backups were completed and checked I restored to factory defaults. The question I have now is in my correspondence with netgear they say to

my advice is backup all the required data and create a new volume in 6.2.2

Has the factory default done this? If not what is the best way to do this? I am not going to use this Nas for anything more than the most basic file storage. As most reveiws now say it is the only thing it good for.

Thanks for reading and any reply is appreciated.

tl/dr:
From my experience do not buy or use the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 drives. Saying this I mentioned it to my supplier and they said they have only been requested to replace 4 drives from 600-odd hard drives of that model. 3 of the said requests were from me!!
From my experience do not buy early versions of hardware that require so many FW updates after release unless there are concrete reviews recommending it.
From my experience do not buy netgears RN104.