Last April I bought two WD Red 4TB WD40EFRX hard drives (I bought them with a difference of 7 days) and replaced them with the two 2TB WD Green I had in the Readynas Ultra 2 with RAIDIATOR 4.2.31 (Readynas HCL indicates that this hard disks are compatible with readynas ultra 2) . I did a hard reset to the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 and started with the default configuration to configure it and enter all my data (about 2tb).
The NAS will have been online all this time (it was stopped about 10 days only on summer). If it was on all that time, there is something that does not work well in the SMART of the hard disks or the way in which the SMART is read.
Today I find that the hard drives have 2528 hours and 2359 hours respectively. Something is wrong. If you have been practically 24 hours since April you can not have that number of hours that is equivalent to about 105 days for the first and 98 days for the second. However, the NAS now has 154 days of uptime. Is this normal?
I do not know if this is the problem of the Raidiator or the SMART of the WD RED, has this happened to more people?
Taking advantage, I downloaded the logs, and there are the last 10 dates of smart that I attach to this message. And there are times when the number of hours is greater than the current one. How is it possible?
I haven't seen this before. Overall the power-on hours stats (like all SMART stats) are maintained in the drive, though of course the NAS itself is periodically reading them out and storing them.
If you can connect the drives to a Windows PC, then you could check the stats there. Acronis Drive Monitor is one free tool you can use (though they will require that you give them your email address). https://www.acronis.com/pl-pl/homecomputing/download/drive-monitor/
If you have ssh enabled, you can also query the SMART stats from the drives directly, using smartctl.
Yes, I have SSH enabled, in readlity was the first thing I thought about checking it by command line. When I tried it via SSH I did it with this command:
smartctl --all / dev / sda smartctl --all / dev / sdb
... and is similar to the information in the last SMART log of readynas
I contacted Western Digital to have the hard drives less than a year old (of the two year warranty they should have with Spanish law) and they came to tell me that it is likely to be an incompatibility with the device (a unconvincing answer) and to get in touch with Netgear.
After reading your message, I disconnected the readynas, and I took the sdb device and connected it by SATA directly on my computer (Intel i3570K with the motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H) believing that maybe the readynas incorrectly reads the SMART from the hard drives. From Spain at least, I do not see the download in the link that you mention of Acronis, even so, I used a similar program that I use daily to check the SMART of the internal hard disks of my computer: CrystalDisk Info.
The information shown is a number of hours too low and similar to what smartctl showed me on the NAS, I insist on the last disconnection of readynas had 151 days of uptime, something I do not understand and more when they have worked almost always since April 2017 and we are in January 2018. A hard drive has been running one week longer than the other, that's fine; but I do not understand, reviewing the logs that I attached, as it is possible that above the 3600 hours approx. - 3700 hours approx. At some point the counters are reset at around 2500 hours and on the two discs "simultaneously" (it is true that smart logs are recorded once a week and this may happen to each disc on days other than the week, but it is clear that I suspect that they follow a pattern).
Could a supposed incompatibility with the readynas cause this failure in SMART? Because this happens on both hard drives. I honestly find it extremely strange, but I believe anything. I must say that the old WD Green that had 2TB (WD20EARS) have always shown correctly the number of hours in operation and have been 5 years without stopping.
Arrived at this moment, I am worried about the most important thing: the stored data, I do not know if I can trust the SMART of the hard disks (I have backup, but I am interested in the reliability of the NAS + hard disks).
What should I do? Change from NAS? Or is it impossible for the NAS to be the cause of the problem?
Could a supposed incompatibility with the readynas cause this failure in SMART? Because this happens on both hard drives. I honestly find it extremely strange, but I believe anything.
I don't see how. The drives are maintaining this data, and you are seeing the same low values when you do the readout on Windows with a different tool.
Also, lots of folks use these drives in Ultras, and I haven't ever seen this reported.
Arrived at this moment, I am worried about the most important thing: the stored data, I do not know if I can trust the SMART of the hard disks (I have backup, but I am interested in the reliability of the NAS + hard disks).
Without knowing the cause, it's difficult to say how big the risk is. You could try replacing one of the Reds with a Seagate Ironwolf I guess. That would reduce the exposure.
Another strategy is to run scheduled disk scrubs on the NAS - they do serve as good diagnostics, though it is tricky if you can't really on SMART.
I was talking in some emails with Western Digital, and finally, I made reference to this netgear thread: they phoned me, I insisted that the SMART should be autonomous of the device. They have insisted that hards disks work for them, unless the Western Digital tool (WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic) says that the disks are in poor condition (and therefore the warranty could apply). They have told me that many incompatibilities can cause this type of events on the disks and that there aren't new versions of the hard drive firmware. Although it may be a bad read of the SMART in the NAS (I think it is false), I insisted that I read the SMART with CrystalDisk Info: They tell me that they trust this tool, but that the RMA is only provided in the disks if the Western Digital tool is used and indicates that the hard disks as failed.
I hope in the next few days to stop the ReadyNAS and check the hard disks again (I'll post it in this thread of the Netgear community). However, I don't have rare software combinations (I have the latest official software version of the ReadyNAS Ultra 2: Raidiator, OS6 has never been installed), I can provide the logs by private message to a moderator / administrator of the forum if necessary.
However, the BIOS of the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 has never been updated, I do not think this is a problem for the SMART to increase the hours correctly. The bios_ver.log file indicates the following: 09/08/2010 ReadyNAS-ProUltra2 V1.4; and apparently there is a new version 11/02/2011 ReadyNAS-ProUltra2 V1.8. Are there any details of what problems are patched? Should I update it? I understand that this BIOS update is completely manual and is not mandatory ... because automatic updates have never suggested it. Is there a reason?
Many thanks again.
Model: ReadyNAS RNDU2000|ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Chassis only
Take into consideration that RAIDiator is old and that version of SMART is from 2011. You could be having a version incompatiblity. Maybe some fixes went into newer versions of SMART. I Google'd and saw that SMART adds additional support for RED drives in smartmontools in later versions.
First of all: thank you very much Kohdee for your answer, it has made me think of some things to find some kind of explanation.
I have tried to advance a little more in this curious case.
I did what WD suggested and I ran the test with their tool. I checked the SMART, and the tool says that the SMART is OK, although I do not see the raw values of each record (I attached captures WD tool vs Crystal disk info):
/dev/sdb
/dev/sda
In what the WD wanted, I think, was to ensure that the surface of the disk is fine. I executed the quick test and the slow test and everything has given OK. However, I still have the doubt of why the hard disk hours descend at certain times. (and that crystaldiskinfo continues to confirm my theory).
I have made the decision, following the previous comment, to update the BIOS to version 1.8 and take advantage of and update to OS6 that will have a newer Smartmontool in the monitoring (I downloaded the OS4 logs).
To leave a record here, when I transferred the information when installing OS6 it was approximately 6 days the first hard disk running without the other, to fill the volume and force a resynchronization.
That is to say, on January 25, 2017 at 7:52 pm, when I inserted the second hard disk, the statistics of the disk are:
/ dev / sda: 2929 hours / dev / sdb: 2643 hours
From that moment on they will be 24 hours continuously, so that the SMART hour counters of both disks should increase correctly in the future (if these counters are lower than these values in the future it is definitely a SMART error that the WD tool is not able to notify).
I know that OS6 is not officially supported, but this happened on OS4 (which is official) being connected to the SATA ports of the NAS chipset (I think it's an Intel® NM10 Express) and that it should not be incompatible and now with a OS / Debian / Linux Kernel / Smartmontools much more updated.
I will keep you all informed.
Thanks to everyone.
/dev/sda/dev/sdb
Model: ReadyNAS RNDU2000|ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Chassis only
