I've only lost everything ONCE in two years, but it's the total lack of any kind of support from Netgear that removes them from the professional catagory. HUNDREDS of people have complained about sudden and catastropic RAID5 failures, with disks marked as 'busy' and therefore unavilable to the end user to attempt to recover. Instead, Netgear holds you hostage, charges an incredibly amount of money to log in via SSH and fixes the filesystem by the command line. Do they TELL you what they did? No, that would kill the golden goose. Do they find the bug and fix it? No, that would also kill the revenue stream from these defective products. ANd then they have the audacity to state, "Well, you should have a backup of your critical data" - and I do, but that is not the point. RAID 5 is a very reliable storage methodology. To have a RAID 5 fifle system co completely off line is nearly impossible with a properly fuctioning system. I have a wide variety of storage solutions from EMC, Dell, Promise, Apple, HP and IBM. NONE OF THEM LEAVE YOU HANGING WITH A FAILURE. Promise, for example took their time to help me even though I had an 8 year old 600F series disk array on like, far out of warranty. Likewise, IBM was incredibly helpful when one of our legacy systems went offline unexpectantly. It makes perfect busines sense, since I gurantee I will not forget their level of support and care for my business and critical data. Likewise, I will not forget Netgear for their total and complete lack of any sort of support for their defective and poorly designed storage products. Thankfully, we are migrating to a product from another company that has a sterling reputation for reliability, performance, compatibility and most importantly, SUPPORT.
Is this with your RN104? I don't see any support cases on your profile.
Or this is for a RN4220? You shouldn't use RAID-5 for a 12 disk volume in the RN4220 (a 12-bay rackmount product). You should be using e.g. RAID-6 with that many disks.
The RN104 (4 bay desktop) is a cost effective home product. With the affordable price for home users it's natural that we have sold a lot of units compared with say several thousand dollar SANs, and users who have issues are the ones that tend to post.
Support charges are there to help cover some of our costs. Our business is built on our hardware sales that come from delivering quality products.
The fixes support does are for specific situations. If used improperly entering shell commands blindly that support used for a previous problem you can cause damage.
If you don't want to pay for support in the unlikely event your volume unfortunately goes offline then restoring from backup is one option open to you. After all backing up your data is your responsibility.
You can also come on the community and seek advice here.
Some on the web reckon that RAID-5 shouldn't be used any more due to the risk in their view of UREs.
There are a range of appetites for risk.
Which disk brand and model are you using btw?
If you can provide some case numbers or send me your logs (see the Sending Logs link in my sig) perhaps I can get a better idea of what happened in your specific situation.
