About a month ago I noticed a "Degraded" status on my RN-214 4-bay and on the Volumes tab bay 2 is showing as empty with no drive. I also kept getting antivirus upgrade errors for no apparent reason. The NAS is online and has access to the Internet. Going back through the logs it appears that the degraded volume alerts actually started in June and the antivirus update failures started shortly thereafter in July. I have since remedied the email alerting issue and am now receiving the alerts via email, which I wasn't prior.
So anyway thinking it was a bad drive in bay 2 I bought an exact replacement drive and popped it in today when it arrived. Same deal. Bay 2 is still showing as empty with no drive installed and Status is still showing as "Degraded".
Do I have a failing chassis here? Are there any troubleshooting steps I can take? The three drives in bays 1, 3, and 4 are all showing as 100% healthy and I still seem to have access to all of my file shares over the network. I'm backing up the entire volume to a directly connected USB drive as I type this should I need to replace the chassis. I've already had one complete loss of data with this unit so doubt I'd buy another Netgear product if the chassis has bitten the dust this time. 😞
You might. So I'd begin with checking the warranty status. Warranty is 3 years for the original purchaser. If you are covered by warranty, then you should be able to engage Netgear support via my.netgear.com and get an RMA.
Other steps you can/should take:
Test both the original drive and the replacement in a windows PC with vendor tools (Seatools or WD's Lifeguard). Run the full non-destructive test (not just the short self-test). The disks can be connected to the PC with either SATA or a USB adapter/dock. Note there are tools that could be used for this in a Mac - but since I don't own any, I can't give advice on them.
Assuming the replacement passes, you can use it to test the bays. Remove the three working disks (NAS powered down of course) and label them by slot. Then do a fresh install with the replacement disk in bay one. When that completes, try powering down the NAS and move the disk to bay 2. Power up the NAS and confirm that it boots. You can repeat this test with bays 3 and 4 if you like.
If bay 2 fails that second test, then it definitely is the chassis.
If bay 2 passes, then it really isn't clear what is going on. I am wondering what disk model you are using. Some disks were silently shifted to SMR technology not long ago (manufacturers have since come clean on this, and are now reporting use of SMR in their datasheets). That includes some desktop drives (including some Seagate Barracudas), and WD EFAX drives between 2 and 6 TB. SMR drives aren't well suited to RAID.
