So I recently experienced a dubious "disk failure" in disk 3 of my ReadyNAS NV+ v2. A growing list of SMART errors on disk 3 prompted the NAS unit to warn me that i would need to replace the disk soon. So I went out and bought another drive of the exact same model (Seagate 3TB ST3000DM001) running the latest firmware (CC4H) and hot-swapped it. While the unit was restriping the X-RAID2 volume during the day, appparently it decided it was unhappy with me having all of my data and hung. The unit would no longer respond to either physical button on the front or the web interface. My only remaining option was to pull the plug on it. After doing so, the volume disappeared and with it all of my data.
So after fiddling around with various options, reinstalling the firmware etc., I finally gave up on ever seeing my data again. I chose the "boil the ocean" approach and did a factory reset, hoping at least to get back a working NAS unit with a brand new volume. I set everything back up, set disk spin down time to 60 min (which I suspect this unit has issues with), and went to work restoring what data I had backed up. This worked great, for about a week. This morning my NAS unit greeted me with a repeating message loop of "Disk 1 has failed", "Disk 2 has failed", "Disk 3 has failed", "Disk 4 has failed", and "Volume C is dead". Seriously? I can no longer access the web interface, and the physical buttons once more do not respond to anything. Should I unplug it again?
Convince me to keep this thing. I'm on the verge of removing my perfectly good disks and throwing it in the trash. :evil:
Here's what I'm running: ReadyNAS NV+ v2 RAIDiator 5.3.7 4x Seagate ST3000DM001 (Firmware CC4H) - Note that all 4 drives have been independently verified using Seagate tools
Well, when I google I see a lot of bad press on ST3000DM001, both here and on some other NAS forums. Personally, I wouldn't have gone with those drives.
Yeah I do have a case open with them at the moment. I do know these drives are on the cheap side and probably more failure prone, and the first disk I replaced I believe may have legitimately been going bad. But 4 disks all at once? Seems really unlikely. I popped out each one and tested them successfully in SeaTools.
The drives don't seem that compatible (despite the fact that they are on the HCL). Did you see reallocated sectors on the other drives? Those would certainly be the disk itself, these "dead drives" might be some other firmware problem (either in the drive firmware or the NAS).
With the original disk 3 failure I did see many, many reallocated sectors on that disk. With the replacement as well as the original disks 1,2, and 4, the value is zero.
So last night I put the unit in "Disk Test" mode, and after completion it reported that all 4 disks are OK, and volume C has returned. The logs, however, do show the following warning:
Detected increasing command timeouts[458759] on disk 1 [ST3000DM001-9YN166, S1F0CMZQ]. This often indicates an impending failure. Please be prepared to replace this disk to maintain data redundancy.
There are other posters who have mentioned the command timeout issue with these drives. On the x86 platform I believe that downgrading the NAS firmware helped. I don't recall that for the v2 though - perhaps other users can comment.
It is. There are a number of incompatible drive/firmware combinations with Seagate though whilst Netgear/Seagate acknowledge the issue they won't say what it is. I had loads of "command timeouts" until I replaced the disks with new ones with the upgraded firmware (not upgradable from the models I had) . Then I saw "fewer" complaints and no dropouts (so far).
The HCL is a joke. There is a reason we have ATA, SATA standards. Any you can buy any drive available and it works in any hardware. I know RAID has issues with extended TLER, and similar, but seriously - this is 2013.
