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Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Nantuc
Star

ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

I have had nothing but problems using my ReadyNAS 204 and 4x Seagate 8TB Archive Drives.  I would have no problem with a drive failure taking two weeks to re-initialize as long as it was truely a drive failure.  But since I bought all of the parts for this last December 2016, I have had maybe one month of stable running.  Every one of the drives has failed at one point and as soon as I get the notification, I restart the NAS and it begins a rebuild which last nearly two weeks.  It sometimes remains stable for a short while, the longest period was a week.  It seems however, that writing data to the NAS triggers whatever is causing the drives to fail, and one of the drives fails again.  Repeat ... 

 

I just recently upgraded to the newest firmware 6.7.4 while it was finishing up a rebuild.  It was redundant for about 3 hours and now another drive failure, I have restarted it again, and it is again rebuilding.

 

Please help.

 

Kevin

Model: RN204|ReadyNAS204
Message 1 of 25

Accepted Solutions
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Thanks for the feedback everyone.  The original issue was the failing drives.  My answer was the firmware update to v6.7.4.  I was just about to spend a ton of money only because I could not keep the drives from failing over and over.  I use the NAS simply for storing videos and almost, if never, need to delete any files, just add to them.  The Raid stripe is all the redundancy that I require and has proven reliable despite over 10 drive failures since last Xmas. 

 

As long as the drives remain as stable as they have for the last week, even after moving new videos to it each day, I am perfectly happy with the performance of the 8TB Seagate archive drives in my ReadyNAS 204.  Hopefully they won't mess anything up that fixed this problem in subsequent firmware updates (crossed fingers).

 

I consider this thread closed.  If the drives become unstable in the future, or I need to upgrade, I will definately get NAS ready drives.

 

Again,

 

Thanks,

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Message 25 of 25

All Replies
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Archive drives are not suited for NAS use.  They are intended for mostly "write once, read many" operations whereas your NAS is constantly updating configuration files, logs, etc.  The drives are "failing" because it takes them too long to respond when you are overwriting things.

 

Maybe if you had a primary volume with standard drives and a second one with archive drives and you don't do a lot of file updating, it could work.  But I wouldn't try it.

 

Unfortunately, you purchased an incompatible drive type, and there is no help in sight.

Message 2 of 25
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

There's a reason why they are called ARCHIVE drives!!!  They are not a normal HDD.  They use what is called SMR, in its simplest terms, is a method of overlaying data tracks, much like shingles on a roof, to increase data storage density. One of the greatest aspects of SMR technology is its low cost per gigabyte

 

Have you had to replace a shingle on your house?  It's not as simple as when you're laying new shingles onto your house.  So writing onto one, not a big deal, you write and it's laying data over the top of theolder dara, layers like a Shingle.   What happens where you delete something and then try to write between the layer's?   It's not a fast process.  Here's more on how SMR works

 

http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/shingled-magnetic-recoding-smr-101-basics,2-933.html#fragment-1

 

By the way, I have a couple of these 8TB Seagate Archive drives.  I use them for what they are designed for Archive. I backup my NAS using them.  Which is exacly what they are designed for.  They are not a way to get mass storage on your PC or NAS for cheap.   You'll have nothing but issues, which what do you know, you are having nothing but problems.   There's nothing wrong with the drives other then you're trying to use them in a NAS.  Something they were never deisgned to do.  Go get some WD 8TB RED drives!!! Those you can use in a NAS and will work great.   Of course they're more money.  If you don't to keep having the issues you're having go buy the NAS drives designed for use in a NAS.  Maybe you start out with just 2 of them, and later add a 3rd and then later add the 4th.   I don't know if you actually need all that storage at once?

 

I know it was temping to use them.  I just got a second one, I got it in a external Seagate case as it's like $30 cheaper then getting just a bare drive!!!  But again, you can't use a SMR type HDD in a NAS or even as a main PC HDD.    Those drives are perfectly fine.  Use them to Backup your NAS.

 

 

Message 3 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

A lot of others had similar issues when these drives first came onto the market.  Seagate clearly states that the drives are not recommended for surveillance or NAS, but of course people often don't check out the data sheets.

 


@JBDragon1 wrote:

Have you had to replace a shingle on your house?  It's not as simple as when you're laying new shingles onto your house.

 


That's a perfect visualization.

Message 4 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Ok, thanks for the feedback.  I did look around on the internet and the only drawback I saw mentioned was the length of time the raid rebuild would be in case of a drive failure.  I had no problem with this.  I did not however, see anything mentioned about the drives consistently failing over and over.  I will replace the lot with 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro's.

 

By the way, the rebuild time after the update to 6.7.4 has significantly been reduced from about two weeks to just over 2 days!

Message 5 of 25
ctechs
Apprentice

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Use the hard drive compatibility list in the future:

 

https://kb.netgear.com/20641/ReadyNAS-Hard-Disk-Compatibility-List

 

Message 6 of 25
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

So wait, you tried to go the cheap route with the 8TB Archive drives, and now you want to go with 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro's?  So the complete opposite of Price and even larger.  Those should work, but really are complete overkill.  Your bottleneck is your 1 Gigabit connection.  The slower normal WD Red NAS or the normal Seagate NAS drive will save you money.  The WD drives are 5400RPM and the Seagate are 5900RPM.  I'm using 4 of the Red's and 2 of the Seagate's.  I can easily Max out my Gigabit Network on file transfers.  

 

Unless you have 10Gigbit Ethernet on your NAS, with a number of users, it really is overkill.  Unless you plan to upgrade your NAS in 6 months to a year and then moving the HDD over to the much faster NAS that could make use of them.  Though I have to say, the price difference from a 10TB WD Red Normal, and a 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro isn't all that much.  A WD Red Pro is even more costly.  Seagate are cheaper drives, but I think WD is better reliability. 

 

The slower NAS HDD's have a few benefits.  Less Heat as they're running slower.  Which is good in a cramped NAS unit.  Which also means they run quieter. They're using less power.  Since they're running slower, less heat, should last longer.   That's my opinion.  3 of my WD Red drives are over 4 years old now and showing zero errors.

Message 7 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@Nantuc wrote:

I will replace the lot with 10TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro's.

 


Those are of course enterprise-class drives.  Though I use Western Digital myself, folks here who use Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pros have been pretty happy with them.   There are some users who found them to be very noisy.  If you experience that, contact Seagate support right away - there might be drive firmware that would fix that.

 

Seagate specs the operating power at 6.8 watts  and the idle power at 4.2.  WDC 10TB Red specs say the operating power is  6.2 watts, which isn't really that big a difference. But the idle power is only 2.8 watts - which would give you lower temperatures.

 

As far as performance goes, large file transfers are limited by your network and perhaps the arm CPU.  You might see a performance boost for directory searches and other functions that require a lot of seeking.

 

Though they might be overkill, they are suitable for your NAS (unlike the SMR drives).   


@Nantuc wrote:

 

By the way, the rebuild time after the update to 6.7.4 has significantly been reduced from about two weeks to just over 2 days!


I'm not seeing anything in the release notes about that.  

 

This is with the new drives?  They would rebuild a lot faster than the SMR ones.

 

Message 8 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

No, not the new drives.  The archive drives.  Typically, it had been taking between a week to two weeks per rebuild, however the rebuild after the firmware update only took 50 hours.

Message 9 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

It isn't the speed I am after as much as the drives are 2TB larger and even more so, the quality of the disk platters.  I read that the material they make the enterprise class drives from is a much higher grade material.  It also why the garantee is 5 years for the pro, instead of 3 for the non-pro version.

Message 10 of 25
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

I'm all for Pro is you have the money to get them!   I'm over 4 years now on 2 of my 4 WD Red drives, one almost 4 and the other 3 years.  I didn't want to buy all the drives at once as you could end up with a bad batch and have more then 1 HDD fail on you at once and cause you to lose all your data.   Plus wear are tear on a HDD that you didn't need the space for at the time.   So I started with 2, then 3 and finally 4, which was all my old NAS could hold until getting the 516, and those 4 drives got moved to that and then a I added a Seagate NAS drive and when that got close, added a second Seagate NAS drive.  6 HDD total and now full.  All show error erros.  

 

I've heard of to many people having a number of HDD fail at once that they got at the same time.  So I think this is the safer way to go.  Don't pack your NAS full all at once.  Pop a new HDD as you need them.  Buy a new HDD as you need them.  If you need one for a spare, you buy the 1 and hold onto that as a spare ready to pop in, but again, buy at a later date or from a differnt company so you're not getting one fromt he same batch.  That's my recomendation.

 

Message 11 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Hi JB,

 

I don't think your idea would help me.

 

I have been collecting videos for 15 years now.  Between my 2 systems at home, I had like 6x 3TB drives spread out amongst the systems.  It got to the point that I was having to delete some videos to make room for new ones, so I finally decided to buy the ReadyNAS.  I now have 15TB of videos, music, and work files that I have stored on the NAS and no longer have enough Room to move all of the data to another location to change the NAS drives out and rebuild the Raid 5.

 

I have decided that if these archive drives keep failing that I would get the largest capacity drives, and feel that the extra 100 euros for each of the pro's was worth the extra 6TB of drive space I would gain in addation to the extra 2 years of warrantee I would get.  The extra speed is a bonus.  This way, I will take the archive drives and buy external enclosures for them and use them to backup all of my data from the newly configured 30TB NAS.  I am hoping this will give me growing room for the next few years.

 

On another note, ever since I upgraded to firmware v6.7.4, I have not had another drive fail.  Typically, it happens shortly after writing new data to the drives, so I am about to move all of the new vids to the drive this weekened and hope for the best.  I will hold off for a bit on this upgrade until I know how stable v6.7.4 has made my NAS.  If it turns out that the v6.7.4 has resolved the drive failing issue, I might not even need to buy new drives.  I am not eager to spend another 1,700 euros on 4 more drives.

Message 12 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@Nantuc wrote:

This way, I will take the archive drives and buy external enclosures for them and use them to backup all of my data from the newly configured 30TB NAS.  I am hoping this will give me growing room for the next few years.

 


This is a reasonable approach.  When you get to the point that you need more slots, you can shift to a 6-bay or 8-bay ReadyNAS.  You can migrate your disks to any other OS-6 NAS without data loss.

 

Though HAMR technology might provide even bigger disks when that time comes.

Message 13 of 25
TeknoJnky
Hero

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@StephenB wrote:

 

You can migrate your disks to any other OS-6 NAS without data loss.

 

os6 ARM can migrate to os6 X64?

 

 

Message 14 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@TeknoJnky wrote:

os6 ARM can migrate to os6 X64?

  


Yes.  

 

Also, I've discovered that x86 can migrate to ARM.

Message 15 of 25
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

OS6 x86 to OS6 ARM whilst technically possible is not recommended.

 

OS6 ARM to OS6 x86 is a good way to go.

 

Where possible you should make sure that your regular backup is up to date before migrating disks across.

Message 16 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@mdgm wrote:

OS6 x86 to OS6 ARM whilst technically possible is not recommended.

 

 


I accidentally did it, and it did work.  The knowledge base article does not have any restrictions:  https://kb.netgear.com/22895/ReadyNAS-OS-6-Migrating-a-volume  If that is incorrect, it should be changed.

 

I do suggest uninstalling any apps before you migrate to different platform type, and reinstalling them when you are done.

Message 17 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Well, I was about to knuckle under and accept defeat, but ...  Ever since I upgraded to v6.7.4 of the OS and after the new rebuild that only took 2 days instead of two weeks, I am happy to say that the NAS has been stable for the longest period since I bought it last Xmas.  I have transferred over 1TB of data to it this weekend, which in the past, had nearly instantly triggered a drive failure.  I don't want to jinx myself, but if it remains stable, then the problem was the firmware all along, wouldn't you say?  I am not saying the firmware was buggy, but maybe improvements were made to accomidate slower reacting drives like my archive drives.  Either way, I am going to keep my fingers crossed, and hope for the best,

Message 18 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing


@Nantuc wrote:

 but maybe improvements were made to accomidate slower reacting drives like my archive drives.


Possibly, since they are taking linux kernel updates fairly regularly.

 

Still, they aren't designed for RAID, so over time I suggest you switch to NAS-purposed models.

Message 19 of 25
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

1TB transfer in a weekend?  I can copy to and from my NAS over the Gigabit Network pretty quickly where I'm Maxed.  Transfering around 6TB overnight of my Network.  So a couple days to restore about 12TB of Data.  

 

Archive drives are not designed for a NAS.  They lack some of the features a NAS drive supports, You're asking for Data loss.  It's your Data, good luck with that.  You may be OK now, as copying files onto it now all at once is like installing a new roof onto your house.  The problems will crop up trying to patch that roof as you delete files and copy new stuff onto it.  Something you don't normally do when using them as a Archive drive.

 

I highly doubt Netgear did anything to 6.7.4 of the OS to fix the issues you were having with these drives.  Again, good luck.

 

Message 20 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

JBDragon1 wrote:

1TB transfer in a weekend?  I can copy to and from my NAS over the Gigabit Network pretty quickly where I'm Maxed.  Transfering around 6TB overnight of my Network.  So a couple days to restore about 12TB of Data.  

 

The transfer only took a short while, I did not say that it took the whole weekend to transfer 1TB.  As far as the rebuild, I already said, I have no problem with rebuild times taking much longer than a normal drive, however, nothing that I read anywhere said the drives would consistantly fail if new data was written to the Raid stripe.

 

JBDragon1 wrote:

Archive drives are not designed for a NAS.  They lack some of the features a NAS drive supports, You're asking for Data loss.  It's your Data, good luck with that.  You may be OK now, as copying files onto it now all at once is like installing a new roof onto your house.  The problems will crop up trying to patch that roof as you delete files and copy new stuff onto it.  Something you don't normally do when using them as a Archive drive.

 

I totally understand that the Archive drives were never deisgned for use in a NAS.  The question is, can they?  I have no issues with the rebuild times taking much longer than normal, as long as the NAS device doesn't incorrectly mark the drive as failed simply because of a lagged response time.

 

JBDragon1 wrote:

I highly doubt Netgear did anything to 6.7.4 of the OS to fix the issues you were having with these drives.  Again, good luck.

 

If you read the release notes, you will see that v6.7.4 fixed an issue formatting drives over 2 TB.  My observation is that after this fix, the drives are now finally stable, and rebuild times have been shortened 80%.

 


 

Message 21 of 25
TeknoJnky
Hero

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

I think the main point everyone is trying to make is;

 

please make sure you keep good back ups so you don't lose data in the future if drives start failing again.

 

if the drives continue to work well enough for you, awesome.

 

Just be prepared for the worst if they become unstable again after a period of being used.

 

btw, thank you for testing out those drives and sharing your experience with them, it may help others decide if they wish to use them, or avoid them, depending their own risk level.

 

Message 22 of 25
JBDragon1
Virtuoso

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Clearly a good backup.  Though I did a restore from my 8TB Archive drives ad have noticed some bad video files where it's screwed up after playing for 20 minutes or whatever and then hits a bad part screwing up the rest of the video.  Not sure what's going on.  Somewhere along the line Data has been screwed up.   So I need to figure this out and so some testing.

 

Besides these 8TB drives being shingled, they lack some of the speical capabilies that NAS drives have.  If it's working for you, great, but I wouldn't recommend them for anyone.  That's the main point.  If you care about your Data and reliability don't use them!!!   Lets hear how it works out, a month from now, 6 months from now, to a year from now.  It;s to early to tell now.  Start erasing and rewriting a number of times is the real test. 

 

Message 23 of 25
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

There were several people who tried these drives when they first came onto the market.  Some found their performance acceptable, others did not.  I recall that a firmware update basically destroyed their performance, but Netgear did make some driver changes to resolve that (back then) even though the disks were not recommended for NAS use and were not on the HCL.

 

I think interest in them has waned, since NAS-purposed drives of 8 TB or larger are now available and affordable.

 

In any event, it sounds to me like you know the risks, and there's not much point in harping on them.

 

If you do run into issues, you might find it better to set these up as JBOD (each disk it's own volume).

 

Message 24 of 25
Nantuc
Star

Re: ReadyNAS 204 - Seagate 8TB Archive Drives Keep Failing

Thanks for the feedback everyone.  The original issue was the failing drives.  My answer was the firmware update to v6.7.4.  I was just about to spend a ton of money only because I could not keep the drives from failing over and over.  I use the NAS simply for storing videos and almost, if never, need to delete any files, just add to them.  The Raid stripe is all the redundancy that I require and has proven reliable despite over 10 drive failures since last Xmas. 

 

As long as the drives remain as stable as they have for the last week, even after moving new videos to it each day, I am perfectly happy with the performance of the 8TB Seagate archive drives in my ReadyNAS 204.  Hopefully they won't mess anything up that fixed this problem in subsequent firmware updates (crossed fingers).

 

I consider this thread closed.  If the drives become unstable in the future, or I need to upgrade, I will definately get NAS ready drives.

 

Again,

 

Thanks,

Message 25 of 25
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