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I suspect my NV+ may have failed and need replacing, but before I give up on it please could anyone advise me based on the symptoms outlined below.
A few years ago I replaced the two failing original HDDs with two 1TB WD Red items, as a redundant array. Since then, it has been working reliably, connected via a UPS to power and ethernet to my home network. I haven't been good at frequently logging on via RaidAr to check its health, but as my Mac Time Machine backups were successful I assumed all was well.
Suddenly, it will no longer back up. The unit is still receiving power: the fan runs continuously and the green lights for bays 1 and 3 remain lit. However, I am unable to power it down and the status screen is dark. I cannot see the device on my network: both RaidAr and entering the usual static IP address fail to find it. I've tried changing ethernet cables. I don't know what firmware version is installed but I haven't updated it for at least 4 years.
I guess this 10-year-old unit has done well, but does this sound terminal or are there steps I should follow to diagnose a likely fixable fault?
Does RAIDar find it if you have no drives installed? if not, there is something wrong with the chassis. if it does, it's something to do with your volume. Check the drive health and be prepared that a factory default may ne required.
If it's the NAS chassis, it strill could be the power supply, even though the fan and LEDs are one. There is a voltage called +5BSB (+5 volts standby) that powers the on/off circuit and the network interface. The power supply is almost a standard mini ITX supply, but the pin-out is slightly modified and there is no fan. With an adapter, a standard ATX supply can be used externally to see if it's just a power issue.
If you have a backup of the data, you need to decide if spending money on the old, slow NAS is worthwhile or if there is a new NAS in your future.
Does RAIDar find it if you have no drives installed? if not, there is something wrong with the chassis. if it does, it's something to do with your volume. Check the drive health and be prepared that a factory default may ne required.
If it's the NAS chassis, it strill could be the power supply, even though the fan and LEDs are one. There is a voltage called +5BSB (+5 volts standby) that powers the on/off circuit and the network interface. The power supply is almost a standard mini ITX supply, but the pin-out is slightly modified and there is no fan. With an adapter, a standard ATX supply can be used externally to see if it's just a power issue.
If you have a backup of the data, you need to decide if spending money on the old, slow NAS is worthwhile or if there is a new NAS in your future.
Many thanks for your helpful reply. I pulled the drives and the NV+ behaves just the same as before. It's invisible to Raidar or browsing static IP address, fan and LEDs 1 and 3 are running, it's unresponsive to attempts to power down with on/off button, and the bottom display is dead. So the good news is my drives are probably intact.
My thought is to replace the NV+ with a decent quality new NAS. Given that I set up the two drives as a RAID array constantly mirroring each other, is there a current compatible, robust, bare NAS available you can recommend where I could just pop in the two drives with the data intact and carry on? Or will it be necessary to migrate the data from one of the drives to some intermediate form of storage while the drives are reformatted for the new NAS?
The local computer shop guy warned me that even with a mirrored RAID array, one drive is always master and the other(s) slaves, and he says one can't necessarily read a single drive in a one-drive caddy. If so, that would seem to negate the whole idea of RAID.
So if you could plot me a route out of this hole, I would again be most grateful. Regardless, perhaps I should be thinking about changing the drives soon anyway? They are WD Red 2TB with NASware 3.0, manufactured 2014. Kind regards.
is there a current compatible, robust, bare NAS available you can recommend where I could just pop in the two drives with the data intact and carry on?
No. Note that the NAS also runs linux from the disks. The OS is for the sparc platform, and that hasn't been used by Netgear since 2011.
So you will need to offload data.
You can connect disk 1 of the NAS to a Windows PC (either with SATA or a USB adapter dock). R-linux for Windows is a free utility that should be able to find your files so you can offload them. https://www.r-studio.com/free-linux-recovery/
The local computer shop guy warned me that even with a mirrored RAID array, one drive is always master and the other(s) slaves, and he says one can't necessarily read a single drive in a one-drive caddy. If so, that would seem to negate the whole idea of RAID.
A mirror is supposed to be exactly that (and in newer ReadyNAS it is). However in the specific case of the old sparc-based platforms, the C volume mirror (or parity disk) isn't partitioned. So the data is there, but can't be easily accessed. I don't know why they did that - it might have been a constraint in the RAID acceleration hardware that the sparc systems use. In any event, that decision was made by Infrant (before Netgear bought then).
Anyway, that is why I specified "disk 1" above. And if R-linux doesn't see the C volume, I suggest trying again with disk 2 - there are some scenarios where the mirror ends up in slot 1.
Thank you StephenB. We have a very helpful chap who runs a computer shop in my small town. Hopefully he will have the hardware available to get the data off my disks, with the help of the replies from you and Sandshark. Maybe he can rig up a temporary power supply as per other threads on this forum. I migrated to a Mac Pro notebook a few years ago and got rid of all my old Windows-based hardware. Shame, I once had old Dell desktops with room for two 3.5" HDDs, ATX power supply etc, and have been known to help my son assemble PCs. But these days I'm into "simplicity", which you might well call "complacency".
I must say I feel pretty cheated by the sudden failure of the NV+. I thought having my own device with a redundant array of disks would be a safe option compared to, say, cloud backup. I even had a secondary backup from the NV+ to a WD My Passport USB drive plugged into the NV+. Now I can no longer read this either when plugged into my Mac, presumably because of the proprietary format.
Anyway, I appreciate your explanation and Sandshark's. I'll keep you posted with the outcome in case it helps others in the same boat.
The USB drive should not be in a proprietary format. You would have chosen the format when you started using it. Since it's not mounting automatically for you, I suspect it's EXT format, for which you can get a Mac driver.
The USB drive should not be in a proprietary format. You would have chosen the format when you started using it. Since it's not mounting automatically for you, I suspect it's EXT format, for which you can get a Mac driver.
Of course it's also possible that the USB drive has failed over the years.
Netgear doesn't use proprietary disk formats generally - the only one I am aware of is the parity disk on the your old v1 NAS. Even that is arguably not proprietary (and in any event, that design predates Netgear).
Thank you guys, you were quite correct of course. I was fast and loose using the word "proprietary". I installed a 10-day trial of extFS for Mac. Now I can see a volume called something like extFS, with loads of subfolders. I also have the option to eject this volume, and when I do I can see another volume on the device that is directly readable, a backup of my old Windows-based PC I created ages ago. Probably wasn't a great idea to have a single USB drive with different file systems. Anyway, that the least of my problems right now. Priority is to #1 make a new image of my complete machine, #2 get the data off those RAID HDDs and #3 decide on a new strategy for Mac backup: a new NAS, cloud storage or perhaps both. And #4 whether to use Mac's Time Machine or something more user-controllable. Please feel free to advise. Thanks again.
3 decide on a new strategy for Mac backup: a new NAS, cloud storage or perhaps both. And
4 whether to use Mac's Time Machine or something more user-controllable.
Apple has deprecated SMB 1 in Catalina (and that is the only version of SMB that your old NAS supports). So if you stay with a NAS solution I do suggest upgrading to something current. The RN214 is a reasonable ReadyNAS option (as is the RN424). Prices in the US look pretty high at the moment (likely a consequence of coronavirus affecting production and parts availability), so maybe wait a bit.
I'm not a Mac user, so I don't have any experience with Time Machine. I use Acronis TrueImage on my PCs - and there is a Mac version available. I use Acronis to make image backups to my ReadyNAS (currently an RN526x) - I don't use their cloud storage. If you want file backup, FreeFileSync is a free alternative you could look at (again using a NAS as a destination).
I back up my NAS with Crashplan (which is running on a Windows PC that has the NAS data volume mounted to a drive letter). That works, but they recently changed their service to exclude image backups, which is a bit of an annoyance.
I also back up my NAS to other ReadyNAS using rsync backup jobs- including my own old NV+. The NV+ doesn't have enough storage anymore, so I can only back up some shares to it.
