I bought my new 4 bay NAS 2 weeks ago and 4 - 4 TB drives for it. My first guess would be that it is busted; and i am taking it back tomorrow; but found this forum and thought i would post just in case this is an known/fixable issue.
I have the NAS connected through a router to my desktop pc (Win7). When i power cycle the NAS and after waiting its ridiculous long 10 min boot time i can see the NAS on my network. It eventually disappears though and needs to be power cycled to show up again.
At first i had it on a long cable with a combined router/cable modem from my ISP and with a 40 foot Cat6 cable. it would usually take a day to drop off the network. I then shortened the cable to 4 feet this did not help. I then thought it might have been the router since this was my 2nd NAS (i also had a dlink NAS which had been connected for years and never shown this issue and it was now starting to be flaky as well). i switched to my old dlink router and the dlink nas has never dropped since doing that change; but the netgear one only lasts about an hour before i need to power cycle.
one of the reason i am assuming this is just a faulty netgear device is that there is a front panel display which goes to sleep on the front. i read that pushing power button should wake the display up - it does nothing.
What version of ReadyNAS OS are you running on the 104?
Are you able to try updating to the latest firmware, verifying the firmware update completed successfully then backing up your data and doing a factory reset (wipes all data, settings, everything)?
i upgraded the f/w when i bought it. it is at 6.1.8. This is a 16TB NAS; pretty sure the concept of "wipe all data" should never be mentioned anywhere.. lol... are you suggesting i go out and buy another 16TB NAS to copy over this data (which takes about 3 days) so i can do the factory reset that is unlikely to do anything?
my hope is that this unit was just busted when i bought it and that i can buy a new one; replace my drives (loaded with data) in to the new NAS and things should be fine. Yes, i am being optimistic. if you tell me i cannot move drives from one netgear nas to another without wiping the data; i'll go back to Dlink as this would be a major flaw in netgear's design.
Went back to store i bought the 104 at and they said i could get a full exchange and i should bring it in and let them do the swap. Not trusting them with not losing my data i bought a new 104:
- swapped over drives from old 104 to new - powered it on connected to router - it auto updated firmware to the same release that the old 104 had
as soon as it finished booting i could see it on my network. That was 8 hrs ago and it still is working fine. Will see if it still there in the morning and then return the old unit - my guess is it was just a flaky unit.
I mentioned "wipe all data" just to make sure you knew that that is what a factory default does. My thought was that this would rule out a possible software issue from upgrading from an old firmware, but the fact a new unit works fine suggests that it was the old 104 unit that was the problem.
As you found you can move drives from one unit to another. In future if you need to migrate the disks again, I would recommend putting a spare disk (must not be from your array) in the new NAS, updating to a firmware at least as new as what you were running, verifying the update was successful, powering down, removing the spare disk then migrating the disks across. Migrating disks with newer firmware installed than what is in the flash of the new unit may not be a problem, but there are some cases where it might, so it is best to get the firmware to the same level or newer just in case.
