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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:
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:
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:
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
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.
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
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.
my advice is backup all the required data and create a new volume in 6.2.2
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.
31 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
mdgm wrote: The RAID was not stopped before it was powered off. So it did a resync on the next boot.
Update: Going Backwards.
As you may see above I awoke yesterday morning to what I thought was the usual freeze during shutdown but since I backed up and factory restored the device it won't even make it as far as a scheduled shutdown. This freeze required the plug to be pulled and now I have my volume rebuilding which is est at another 30+ hours. So it seems I have been upgraded to the random device freeze issue mentioned in numerous threads here.
My latest advice is to rule out the disks with seatools and run the memory test boot option. I'm going to be doing this over the next 48 hours. the thing I find really funny is that I seem to be beta testing an officially released firmware.
Is there a magic number of units that have to go through this? Would anybody honestly recommend the OS6 netgear devices? In my experience OS6 has never delivered in nearly 2 years of use. I can say that it hadn't from the start because the features advertised when I bought it like spindown were still to be added in later firmwares. And we all know how these updates are going.
The excuse of not being able to replicate the issue surely cannot be enough. If a 3 disk setup in x-raid and plugged into a bog standard ISP router is a issue the device should not be sold. If you are selling a NAS designed for home use Joe Soap needs to be able to use it.- I've been happy with the RN102 and RN202 (though beta), so my experience with OS6 has been different from yours.
I do agree that there have been growing pains, especially since the 6.2 release. Though I haven't experienced any of the 6.2 issues myself. - We have recently done extra testing of the 100 series to attempt to see if it could be reproduced in a typical home environment. We were still unable to reproduce the problem. Our testing found the NAS ran fine with zero lockups.
We don't release firmware without it passing QA testing.
Since we cannot reproduce it, it must be a problem that is specific to some environments. That is why we are using serial access to a few units with the problem to try to get the information we need to determine what is going on.
There are a huge number of environments out there in different places all around the world. It's unfortunate that problems like this one can happen and it's frustrating that the reason for the lockups aren't being logged.
It's inevitable that users with problems do most of the posting on the forums. We have seen a higher than usual level of posts about lockups which does show there is a problem, but still the majority of our users' systems are running fine.
We are doing everything we can to diagnose and fix the problem as soon as possible. StephenB wrote: I've been happy with the RN102 and RN202 (though beta), so my experience with OS6 has been different from yours.
I do agree that there have been growing pains, especially since the 6.2 release. Though I haven't experienced any of the 6.2 issues myself.
But that doesn't change the fact of the issues being faced by multiple users.
Would you agree my point that the product advertised did not match the one delivered? when inquiring about missing features we were told said features are expected in version 6.x. and now when said firmware comes along it seems to be a bit of a disaster. The one question I brought forward to direct Netgear support which resulted in a roundabout acceptance of responsibility was after I was told to do a factory restore as early FW version volumes were not good enough. I then asked who's fault that was to which I got:"I apologize for the inconvenience that this had caused you."
followed of course with the pay for support contract request.
How many years of growing pains are to expected.- Out with the old in with the new. 3 seagate drives out and a new WD Red Nas WD30EFRX installed.
3 seagates will get seatools check when time permits. WD drive has a few files moved onto it and the daily shutdown boot up times set.
What snapshot settings are recommended these days?
No other settings changed bar the ip. - Depends on how the share is used.
For some shares snapshots are a better idea than for others. If you make a huge number of in place modifications to files the CoW nature of snapshots will lead to a lot of fragmentation. - Unit is currently frozen. Buttons do nothing, can't see anything. Can only ping.
Would anybody like to buy a rn104? It'll only cost you your sanity. - We are continuing to look into why some 100 series systems are locking up. The issue has not been reproducible so far, but we are getting console output from a few customers which is assisting us with our investigation into this issue.
- I feel completely conned and foolish but what choice do I have now. If the WD Red worked I would have sold the seagates and put in some WD's and hopefully start my new life with a "functioning" NAS. I can only work with the evidence in front of me and right now it all points to the RN104 to be faulty since plugging it in.
The theory it was the drives is in my eyes off the table now because of the testing with the WD. The fact 75% of returned drives in that model to my supplier were from me suggests that maybe rather than the seagates being a dodgey drive maybe the drives aren't liked by the RN104 and therefore should not be on the list of drives to use.
I have also been updating my case file (number in the title) because I don't want it to automatically close. Their latest response is the following:Hi Chris,
Thank you for the response. Based on the discussion on the previous email, the support in the forums have different process and contact support has also different process on how to handle cases. The options are on the previous emails.
Thank you for choosing NETGEAR.
So here's some questions,
If I had my paid subscription or if I am in my 90 days would the issues happening to my NAS being dealt with differently and if so how?
Is there communication with Netgear and the mods here? - Independent disk review sites show those SeaGates have higher failure rates than e.g. the WD REDs. They provide numbers based on the huge quantity of drives they use and the failure rates they experience.
Support cases are handled by our support team. Support on the forums is on a best effort basis. The forums are primarily there for users to help each other with some assistance from NETGEAR where needed.
With a current support warranty or support contract support works to resolve a problem. It is not best effort.
We are continuing to look into why lockups are occurring for a number of users and attempting to reproduce this problem. It is as frustrating for us as it is for you that the issue has not been reproducible. When an issue cannot be reproduced it can add considerable time especially when the cause of the problem is not showing in the logs.
At this time I don't think there is more that could be being done than is being done to look into this problem. We are getting crash dumps from a few customers.
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