REadyNas 628X Ticket escalated to LVL 3 with no response in nearly 3 days.
Purchased a 628X unit as an upgrade to my 626X readyNas. Swapped the 6 WDD RED PRo 6TB drives over to the 628X with no issues and validated everything came up and was operational. Began adding the 7th WDD Red Pro 6TB drive and the unit went into degraded status as it resynced with the 7th drive. The unit became unresponsive and was no longer accessible via HTTP or raidar. Forced to restart unit and it would not boot. Netgear support had me take all drives out and reboot and the unit booted up. Added single drives adn the unit booted till the 5th drive was added. Noted that initially the 626X was raid 5 and the 628X showed raid 6 after attempting to add the 7th drive in X-Raid. Support indicated that was normal. They then stated they had to escalate to LVL 3 which has been open for more than 48 hours with no updates other than my inquiries.
Phoned yesterday to get a progress update - told relevant department will be responding soon.. Unable to give me any further information other than telling me they would reach out to Ryan whom is assigned to my case. Told me they would ensure that I would be contacted with an update - this is 24 hours ago. Asked me to reboot the NAS unit into tech support so that it shows in their list. I've done this 3 times and it displays but disappears after a period of time. I was also asked to open teamviewer and have had putty installed for telenet services into NAS. No login, no communications or updates to the ticket other than my updates asking where the process is on a brand new ReadyNas.
Really don't know what to think anymore- I hear of users receiving good support, which in general I would agree with till this recent experience with the NAS LVL 3 team. I have been unimpressed with level 3. lack of communication & no action. I understand that they have work to do, but at least tell users what is going on. The unit is within its return window and I'm now contiplating just boxing it up and calling it a lose at this point and start over with another product. I'd love to have my unit restored with the configuration and data but not if it takes me outside of my ability to return a defective unit. Frustrated at this point is an understatement.
Model: RN628X|ReadyNAS 628X - Ultimate Performance Business Data Storage - 8-Bay
Noted that initially the 626X was raid 5 and the 628X showed raid 6 after attempting to add the 7th drive in X-Raid. Support indicated that was normal.
Yes, that is normal. The idea is that dual-redundancy is the best default option when you have > 6 disks in the array. You could have switched to flexraid and maintained RAID-5.
Re: REadyNas 628X Ticket escalated to LVL 3 with no response in nearly 3 days.
Thank you Stephen for the raid options. I'm good with the raid 6 dual redundancy. I have tested all the drives with WDD tool and no issues were detected on any of the drives. The odd piece was when 4 drives were in the unit and booted raidar showed that the 3 of the drives were at 13TB capacity and full with the 4th drive having no volume associated. Not sure if that is normal for only 4 drives being present.
The odd piece was when 4 drives were in the unit and booted raidar showed that the 3 of the drives were at 13TB capacity and full with the 4th drive having no volume associated. Not sure if that is normal for only 4 drives being present.
The rule for single redundancy is "sum the drives and subtract the largest". 4x6TB should give you an 18 TB volume - which would be reported as ~14.5 TiB in the NAS. 3x6TB would be 12 TB (or ~10.9 TiB).
All drives should have been part of the volume - though it was already formatted, you'd probably need to reformat it in the NAS in order to add it.
Of course the volume also should have been empty - not full.
On the main issue - L3 is obviously engaged for a reason, and we likely don't have enough info here to know that that reason is. Sometimes there are issues with the backplane, or a bad PSU that can cause issues when you install all the disks.
If you are looking for something to try, then maybe do an install on a single disk, and then try it in each slot (power down, move the disk, power back up). That will help you see if all the bays are working.
Re: REadyNas 628X Ticket escalated to LVL 3 with no response in nearly 3 days.
Thanks Stephen. I will give that a go and try moving a spare drive along the bays.
This was a working volume in a 626X and I upgraded to the 628X. Moved the drives as directed per Netgear 1-6 to the new unit. Validated all was working with the 6 drives. Perrformed back up. Then proceeded to shutdown and add 7th drive. The unit booted and proceeded to add the drive to the volume. I got the volume is degraded message and saw the percentage complete. Everything was progressing just fine till Monday morning when the units admin page was not accessible and the raidar tool couldnt locate the unit. I finally did a hard power off as the front graceful power off method was not working. I then proceeded to reboot the unit and it will get to 99% and hang. If I remove all the drives the unit will boot up. If I place drive one by one up to 4 the unit will boot. Once I place the 5th drive in the unit goes to 99% and hangs.
Re: REadyNas 628X Ticket escalated to LVL 3 with no response in nearly 3 days.
I believe that this is because 5 of 7 RAID6 drives are enough for it to recognize there is a volume present and less than that is not, which would mean volume integrity is the issue. Unfortunately, you may have been premature in stopping the re-sync. I have seen (and reported, as have others) issues with the ReadyNAS becoming unresponsive during processes such as sync and scrub, including the readynasd process reaching 100% CPU usage. In many cases, it ultimately does complete the action, though it takes forever because there is so little throughput available. This has even occurred on a powerful rack-mount NAS (4 core Xeon and 8GB memory). Netgear is either unable to duplicate this or doesn't care to try.
Netgear support likely can repair your volume. Unfortunately, I do not know how to help you get them to give you that support.
Re: REadyNas 628X Ticket escalated to LVL 3 with no response in nearly 3 days.
Sandshark - Unfortunately what you are sharing is most likely the case. Netgear support did login to my unit finally and they said the reshaping had to finish. However, after a few hours of monitoring the support tech said my volume must be corrupt from adding the 7th drive and they wouldn't be able to recover. I find it suspect that the reshaping had not finished and was inching along but due to the amount of time it was going to take they determined that a factory reset was a better option. Of course gave me the 3rd party data recovery options as well. The saving grace here is I took the back up prior to adding the 7th drive. If I"m going through the trouble of factory resetting my unit and reconfiguring in order to restore my back up I'm most likely finished with Netgear. In no way should adding a drive cause this much grief to a supposed "flexible system". In my opinion the amount of time wasted waiting for Netgear and the amount of time to reconfigure warrants my descision the Netgear simply doesn't care.
Thank you for you assistance and sharing of information.
