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ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

hakonf
Aspirant

ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

The disk on my ReadyNAS Duo v2 is often accessed (I can hear typical read or write sounds) for no apparent reason. Recently, I have discovered that this happens daily for hours on end. How can I figure out what is going on?
Message 1 of 8
vandermerwe
Master

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

What firmware is running?
Just one disk?
What make and model disk?
Are the disk smart stats showing any errors?
Do you have any addons installed?
Do you have port forwarding active, involving the readynas?
What is the volume status?

If you disconnect the nas Ethernet cable does the activity persist?

Do you have a backup of the data on the nas?
Message 2 of 8
hakonf
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

Thanks for follow-up questions; I'm afraid I may not have answers to them all.

I don't know if I have port forwarding activated but I don't think I have set it up knowingly. And I have not now had an opportunity to pull the ethernet cable while the disk was active.

RAIDar-4.3.8 reports RAIDiator 5.3.10; but it also reports that neither volume, disks nor fan are present, which is clearly untrue.
RAIDiator reports through the web interface that volume, fan and temp are OK.
ReadyNAS Photos II was installed by default and is running but has never been used; there are no other addons.
The single compatible disk whose make and model I cannot recall right now appears to be OK, and I can reach its contents through the regular Windows disk mappings that I made at installation a long time ago. However, in Windows Explorer, the ReadyNAS now only appears as storage and not as a network location with shares; consequently, its external USB disk (front port) is no longer visible from Windows.

I have now also discovered some issues in the backup setup. I have previously defined two backup jobs to copy files from shares on the ReadyNAS to an external USB disk. I usually keep this USB disk off site, so most of the scheduled backup jobs fail for good reasons. The logs show that the latest manual backups (initiated by pushbutton defined to run the two defined backup jobs) were OK but the logs have no entries for the last twelve days. (The abnormal disk activity has lasted much longer than that, however.) Furthermore, one of the two backup jobs is now registered with destination "No longer exists" while the other one is OK. I can not repair the backup job definition, nor can I delete it, nor can I add a new job.

I realize I should upgrade RAIDiator but I would like to have an up to date backup before that, since I have no UPS. I won't speculate in Heartbleed and what not; but there may be some root cause behind the disk activity, the non-functioning backup setup, and the lack of data provided to RAIDar and Windows Explorer.
Message 3 of 8
vandermerwe
Master

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

I would first make a backup.
Few things you can try, one of which is an OS reinstall using the boot menu. This is described in the manual.

Another is a little more difficult:
Do you have ssh enabled?
If not you can install this addon using the update facility in the GUI.
http://www.readynas.com/download/addons ... .0-arm.bin

Once ssh is on, install putty on your PC
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgta ... nload.html
Use putty to ssh in to the nas, the login is root , the password is your admin password.

Then type
df -i
df -h

After each line just hit enter
Post the results of this, you are basically checking the status of the small OS partition which can become full and creates all sorts of issues.
If you want to disable ssh just add the same addon again and will switch it off.
You can also download your logs and look in the disk usage log. Before doing this I would delete all of your backup job logs. Downloading logs can make this problem worse though.

Either way post the results.
Edit: of course if the unit is still under warranty, contact support too as next post suggests.
Message 4 of 8
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

The warranty on the v2 NAS is 3 years, so you are likely still covered. So perhaps also email Netgear support via support.netgear.com.
Message 5 of 8
hakonf
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

There has been a week's silence on my part because this is how long it has taken to perform the first proposed step: to take a full backup from the NAS drive to an external USB hard drive. Before I move on to reinstalling the OS or adding SSH access, I would like to check out a few things first.

I rebooted the NAS and it started giving data to RAIDar and the Windows client. No more churning for hours on end, either.

I then cleared all logs on the NAS (I probably should have attempted to access them first in some ways, as they were later requested by Netgear support.)

I managed to edit one of the two backup jobs (one share on NAS to USB) to an unscheduled one. I managed to run it with success.

I could not edit the other backup job (multiple home shares on NAS to USB), so I deleted it and created a new (unscheduled) one. It took forever to complete - except that it ended in failure, and I could not view the log. So I decided to compare files on source and target, using Explorer from a Windows 7 client. In one of the trees there was a discrepancy: five files and one folder less on the target. However, on closer inspection, these turned out to be there after all. This is probably a Windows issue? In one of the other trees the discrepancies were much greater, so I decided to do a manual copy from source to target, again using Windows Explorer. I got into serious performance problems, with transfer rates typically between 0.8 and 1.8 MB/sec. I moved the USB disk from the NAS to the Windows computer, and the transfer rates went slightly up. For some transfers, I reached 10 MB/sec. I believe the number of files per directory has something to do with this.

Two directory trees on the USB disk are now not accessible. (Both say "corrupted and unreadable", but at first, one of them said that I did not have access rights.) I thought this might be due to not following procedure when unhooking it from the NAS (I may have had disc caching activated). However, I have later found from the previously unavailable backup log that there are multiple errors of the form
cp: cannot create regular file. ... Input/output error.
cp: writing ... Input/output error.
So there may be a disk failure involved on the USB disk side?

After a week, then, I am confident that I have a copy of all the user data on the external USB drive, ready for step 2: To contact Netgear user support over their chat channel. My 90 day support period has long expired but not so my three year hardware warranty. However, two very helpful experts gave two different tentative diagnostic lines of inquiry, both of which may be plausible, but in order to find out whether there is a hardware fault (qualifying for NAS replacement), I would have to pay for access to level 2 support, and I could almost buy a replacement NAS for the minimum contract price (one hour incident support). So this is no my first choice. I indicated that there might be a design fault (as suggested in the user forum) that leads to a filled up OS partition which again may lead to all sorts of problems, and that I could not find any readily visible warning in the user documentation to regularly clear logs. I got no comment to this, but I guess it means that they don't cover design faults embedded in firmware through their hardware warranty?

I should add that during the chat session I also managed to download all logs from the NAS in one zip file (11 MB). They cover the last week (since I cleared all logs after rebooting). So they will not reveal anything about the incessant disk activity that prompted my user forum topic in the first place but there may be some other information there.

Given this new information, any revised suggestions for the next step? The disk churning, as I said, seems to have disappeared; it may have been related to the daily scheduled incremental backup jobs not finding an external USB target, but this is pure speculation. There are clearly other problems here as well.
Message 6 of 8
vandermerwe
Master

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

Well the usb I/o errors may indicate a bad disk. You should test this disk using vendor tools. If this USB disk is your only backup, I would be quite concerned. If it is not on the USB disk, you could, if it tests ok, reformat it and try to see if this improves performance. How is the USB disk currently formatted?

The OS partition fullness can be checked using ssh and using:
df -i
df -h


r by looking in disk_usage.log . If you unzip the logs you sent, you'll find this there.

I would really concentrate on getting to a point where you have a more stable backup first. That disk ( and your backup) sounds like it is in trouble.
Message 7 of 8
hakonf
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Duo v2 disk runs incessantly

I have just spent an hour composing a response but thanks to login problems to this forum, the response has vanished in thin air, and I won't have the time to reconstruct that for a very long time now. Thanks are nevertheless due to forum members for addressing my ReadyNAS problems and readily sharing their knowledge. Very briefly, I now have three copies of the data, no hardware errors have been identified, and none of the problems I have met have been fully explained, but at least the incessant disk churning is no longer there.
Message 8 of 8
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