The problem will not appear in 12 hours. It could be several weeks, then one day you'll get a drive failure detected email (make sure that you have email alerts turned on and test that it works). The channel will report as "dead". Sometimes simply shutting down, turning off and turning back on will cause the volume to resync. Sometimes you need to take the drive out, "erase" it elsewhere and plug it back in to cause the resync.
My last failure was June 21st. Prior to that was June 12th... June 2nd... May 22nd... March 23rd... March 11th. You get the idea -- these are not drives you can trust.
well i said we are working on a doc, so be patient please.
I have been... very patient... 9+ months. How much longer are you asking us to be patient? The "dead" drive problem happens so frequently for me that I have lost patience.
DAK
dont blame me for seagate taking so long to fix their harddrives..
we will publish the doc with links to the files when its ready.
I don't blame you for Seagate's problem. I don't blame you for anything.
I do blame ReadyNAS for putting these drives on the HCL when they clearly had no business being there.
Appropriate customer service would be to give a date when you expect that document to be ready. Excellent customer service would be working round the clock to get it done. You can probably guess what sort of customer service I think "don't blame me, be patient" is.
When you are waiting for another company to solve a problem it is impossible to provide a date for anything. The original version of these drives may have worked fine. This happens when companies start "tweaking" their products and do not change the model numbers. This is one reason there is no longer an HCL for memory modules, they companies changed the chip arrangement and they were no longer reliable. The old ones worked, the new ones with the same model did not. This also happened with another manufacturer when they changed a drive around, but kept the same model number.
When you are waiting for another company to solve a problem it is impossible to provide a date for anything.
I'm neutral on how you want to run PR and not looking to contribute to the ill will in some of the threads, but maybe it might be (or might have been) a good move to pull the drive from the HCL, and even a super-move to ask Amazon not stop bundling them (which is the deal I bought my Pro 6 with). I will promptly return my pitchfork to the shed.
PapaBear wrote:
... This happens when companies start "tweaking" their products and do not change the model numbers.
I hear that! Compaq did this to a company I was consulting for years back - the same model laptop with the same SKU, but suddenly the laptops started coming with Atheros wireless cards instead of Intel (or maybe the other way around). It was a huge pain in the ass to not only mirror and update the Windows 2000 images, but also to have to check before deploying the image which card was installed. I don't recall why they didn't do the driver installation post-image as a fix, but there was a reason... :roll:
I decided to do a warranty return of a couple of disks that had failed out of my ReadyNAS just to see what happened.
Seagate is, at the moment, out of stock of this model disk drive, with no expected ship date.
So, at this point, I have a bunch of disks that "fail" regularly and were made, retroactively, incompatible with my ReadyNAS and no clear path to make them compatible.
This is rather unfortunate and raises questions, to me, about what sort of testing is done to include a disk on the HCL and the commitment there is to standing behind past assertions of compatibility.
Seagate's back in stock and shipped two replacement drives that came with the CC32 revision firmware. So, that didn't help.
When you are waiting for another company to solve a problem it is impossible to provide a date for anything. The original version of these drives may have worked fine. This happens when companies start "tweaking" their products and do not change the model numbers. This is one reason there is no longer an HCL for memory modules, they companies changed the chip arrangement and they were no longer reliable. The old ones worked, the new ones with the same model did not. This also happened with another manufacturer when they changed a drive around, but kept the same model number.
It was said further back up on the thread that Seagate has fixed its problem and that Netgear is working on a process that would document how to build a USB disk that would let us get the proper firmware onto our disks. Suggesting that Netgear provide a firm date for that documentation doesn't seem like asking for the impossible.
Look, I understand completely the complexity of the situation into which Netgear has chosen to enter when it's shipping disk-based hardware appliances and supporting folks who wish to choose their own disk drives. But that's a complexity Netgear has chosen to take upon themselves.
I could be screaming bloody murder about lost time/lost money and about the absurdity of retroactively declaring a device incompatible. I could be proclaiming that the only appropriate use for my ReadyNAS is as landfill.
I'm not. I still think that I bought the right device and fell into an unfortunate anomaly that happens in this complex age we live in. I think it's absolutely fair to be asking Netgear to do better in terms of support and communications to help us out of this anomaly. And, if they either won't or can't, that's an important data point.
It's not about PR, and remember we are all members here not staff unless it says Jedi, or Padiwan. Perhaps the reason they haven't pulled the drives from the HCL, is that not all versions of that model number are giving problems. The 9VT166 are, I believe but don't know for sure that the 9VT167 are but the 9VT168 to my understanding are not. They tried putting the product ID on the list for one of the WD drives, but within months they were no longer in the retail chain.
As a long term Seagate user, the last batch of drives I bought (3TB) were Hitachi. However, that model is no longer in the retail chain, which will take me back to SG for future drives.
the problem is, that the document we are working on needs to go through some testing first. we wouldnt want you guys to accidentally fry your disks because we forgot some minor details.
I understand the need for testing. Getting this done quickly is important, but being transparent about time frames is even more important.
Note: I've gone through 2 disk "failures" since my last posting on this subject. It's a good thing I went with 2 disk redundancy, otherwise I'd have lost the contents of my ReadyNAS, something that's happened once already.
Back in my professional IT life, I once went through storage problems from hell, when an array from a major vendor went through six weeks of the most bizarre and unfathomable problems. You really haven't lived until you're told that the survival of the contents of your array depends on nothing going wrong because all your redundancy has failed and you've exhausted the entire stock of drives east of the Mississsippi. My tolerance is rather high because of that experience, but please, get ths done as quickly as possible. And if you need testers, please ask. I'm willing to absorb some risk to get this over with as soon as possible.
sorry for the long wait. we had to wait for seagate for this. but have a look here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=64510
Thank you. I tried it and it failed. I connected one of my drives to an old dell machine and booted the CD I had created, pressed "D" to download the firmware into the drive and received the following message...
Model ST2000DL003-9VT166 SN 5YD41C75 FW CC32 on Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R Bus 4 Device 0 Model Matched, No Firmware Match! Will Not Download Firmware! ******** Model matched but firmware version is not compatible. ********
When you said that you were working on a USB flash drive to upgrade the drives, I was hoping that it would be something I could boot on my ReadyNAS and have it upgrade my drives in place.
Since it's not, here's what I'm going to have to do.
1) Buy a wired keyboard because FreeDOS won't work with my bluetooth keyboard on my Mac Pro. 2) Pull all the drives from my Mac. 3) Yank a disk from my ReadyNAS, take it out of the sled, and put into the Mac and see if it upgrades. 4) Repeat step three until done.
Of course, I'm not going to know for sure about compatibility between my Mac and the updater until I get a wired keyboard because you can't start the upgrade witout one.
In reality, step 3, for the first disk is less hard than otherwise because another disk just failed out of my array. And if it turns out the process isn't destructive to disks, it isn't all that horrible a process.
But "really not that horrible" is a very low bar to reach for.
sorry for the long wait. we had to wait for seagate for this. but have a look here: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=64510
Thank you. I tried it and it failed. I connected one of my drives to an old dell machine and booted the CD I had created, pressed "D" to download the firmware into the drive and received the following message...
Model ST2000DL003-9VT166 SN 5YD41C75 FW CC32 on Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R Bus 4 Device 0 Model Matched, No Firmware Match! Will Not Download Firmware! ******** Model matched but firmware version is not compatible. ********
So, back to square one?
David
ok thats interesting. let me forward this to the engineering guys and see what seagate has to say about this.
When you said that you were working on a USB flash drive to upgrade the drives, I was hoping that it would be something I could boot on my ReadyNAS and have it upgrade my drives in place.
Since it's not, here's what I'm going to have to do.
1) Buy a wired keyboard because FreeDOS won't work with my bluetooth keyboard on my Mac Pro. 2) Pull all the drives from my Mac. 3) Yank a disk from my ReadyNAS, take it out of the sled, and put into the Mac and see if it upgrades. 4) Repeat step three until done.
Of course, I'm not going to know for sure about compatibility between my Mac and the updater until I get a wired keyboard because you can't start the upgrade witout one.
In reality, step 3, for the first disk is less hard than otherwise because another disk just failed out of my array. And if it turns out the process isn't destructive to disks, it isn't all that horrible a process.
But "really not that horrible" is a very low bar to reach for.
yeah even the usb key procedure would have involved booting a pc off of it. its basically the same thing the iso does, just from usb, not cd.
sorry for the long wait. we had to wait for seagate for this. but have a look here: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=64510
Thank you. I tried it and it failed. I connected one of my drives to an old dell machine and booted the CD I had created, pressed "D" to download the firmware into the drive and received the following message...
Model ST2000DL003-9VT166 SN 5YD41C75 FW CC32 on Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R Bus 4 Device 0 Model Matched, No Firmware Match! Will Not Download Firmware! ******** Model matched but firmware version is not compatible. ********
So, back to square one?
David
I tried to upgrade the fimware and got the same error message ("Model Matched, No Firmware Match! Will Not Download Firmware! "). I had two out of three ST2000DL003-9VT166 drives have the "DEAD DISK" problem and am anxious for a solution. I hope the new firmware gets sorted out.
I tried to upgrade the fimware and got the same error message ("Model Matched, No Firmware Match! Will Not Download Firmware! "). I had two out of three ST2000DL003-9VT166 drives have the "DEAD DISK" problem and am anxious for a solution. I hope the new firmware gets sorted out.
I've given up. Bought two 3TB new WD "RED" drives designed for NAS to replace these Seagate duds. I can sleep more soundly at night now. Looking for a way to repurpose the two Seagate 2TB drives that I don't trust in the ReadyNAS.
Where can I find the hd firmware update procedure for the Ultra 4?
Process is the same irrespective of ReadyNAS device. You have to remove the disk from the NAS, connect it to another system (directly to SATA not through a USB adapter) and then boot that system using the Seagate flash CD-ROM. And hope it works -- two of us here have found that it will not update our firmware.
it looks like the seagate flash cd only works for drives with cc3c firmware. the cc32 ones are most likely different hardware. im currently trying to find out more.
it looks like the seagate flash cd only works for drives with cc3c firmware. the cc32 ones are most likely different hardware. im currently trying to find out more.
Beisser,
Thank you for continuing to work on this problem. Have you heard anything from Seagate regarding a firmware upgrade for firmware version cc32?
I appreciate the updates, but I'm going to nag for another one. Five of my six drives are CC32s, so I'm still stuck with 5 drives that have been declared retroactively incompatible without any path forward.
Thanks for all the time and work you have spent in trying to resolve this issue. I have once again entered my Seagate serial numbers and the reply back I get is that I have the latest firmware. My drive part numbers (P/N 9VT166-302) and firmware (CC3C) all indicate that I could and should be able to download and install this newer firmware with all applicable fixes (CC3D). Why is it that Seagate continues to state I have up to date firmware? Also the link you gave (https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/cer ... 9139680363) to get firmware CC3D is not working. Every time I try to download it fails after 20-30 seconds. I would like to upgrade my firmware to CC3D, can you please elaborate on why Seagate refuses to acknowledge a newer firmware when I enter my serial numbers and also can you get a working link. Again Thanks for all your hard work!
