Hi, Installed a replacement 4tb drive into ny RN10400 after it reported a degraded volume. Did a factory reset but it seems stuck. Display reads - Installing FW creating volume. Ive left it now 48hrs and it remains unchanged. Cannot access any % or progress. Is this unit stuck or do i need to leave it. Any help would be appreciated.
Have you tested that the new drive is good? Bad drives straight from the factory do occur. Vendor tools on a PC and connecting the drive via SATA or a USB-to-SATA dock is the best way to test them
Did you check the old drive? It's possible that the NAS was the problem, not the drive.
I hope you realize that a factory reset deletes all your data. As @schumaku stated, a reset is not normally required for a drive replacement. If your volume is a JBOD of multiple drives, then deleting and re-creating the volume would be necessary, or you could just do a factory reset.
You could test the NAS to see if all the bays are OK. Remove all the drives, labeling so you put them back where they belong in the end. Then put in just a drive that contains no data you care about. If it tested fine, the new one you bought should work for this. With just that drive installed, create a volume. Once that's complete, power down and move the drive to the next bay and power up. You won't have to create a volume again. Continue until all bays are tested.
@Ian_Chapman: With all due respect to the mods, the HCL for ReadyNAS isn't being updated, and contains a lot of drives that are no longer on the market. The newest disk I see on the HCL was launched 2 years ago.
For instance, the HCL contains the original 4 TB Seagate Barracuda model ST4000DM000 - launched in 2013. That was CMR. But the currently shipping 4 TB Barracuda is ST4000DM004 - launched in 2017. The DM004 drive is SMR. Netgear doesn't retest when updated models are introduced, even though the DM004 is a very different drive than the older DM000.
Folks here have had issues using SMR drives in their ReadyNAS, and many folks testing them with NAS have run into serious performance problems. If you don't know what SMR is, there is a summary here:
IMO the best options for the RN104 are WD Red Plus and Seagate Ironwolf. Enterprise-class drives are also safe choices, but the RN104 can't really take full advantage of their increased performance.
Avoid the WD Reds, as they use SMR technology.
Also I recommend avoiding all desktop drives, even if they are on the HCL. Many desktop drives in the 2-6 TB range have switched over to SMR technology to save costs (reducing the number of internal platters). WD Red Plus and Seagate Ironwolf drives are very affordable, and are safer choices.
