My ReadyNAS Pro4 is destroying drives. I have the latest firmware installed. This unit was running fine for the past year and then for no reason and without warning it decided that two of my drives were dead. Ok so off to WDC they went for RMA. Received two new EARX drives (on the supported list) and stuck them in. Got green lights on those two drive, but now another drive is dead. Instead of sending this one back I ran a full WDC diagnostics and it passed with flying colors. So I zero'ed the drive out (Boy did that take a long time) and stuck in and got a green light. Ok so now the ReadyNAS Pro 4 is coming up with all sorts of errors say it could not find shares and blah, blah, blah. So I did a factory reset, went through the wizard and now find that I cannot ad this unit to my domain. Ok whatever, moving on. Eeek! another dead drive! This was one of the replaced drives. WTF Netgear!!! Seriously!? I really do not have time for this BS.
Ok calm down. So I pull every drive and test. All pass with flying colors. Zero'ed out all the drive and started over and even reflashed the firmware just in cased. Still getting random errors and dead drives. So I have $1000 brick that does nothing but burn electricity oh and waste my time.
It's quite possible that you have a failed chassis but NetGear may need to do some troubleshooting to see if this is the case. Do remember the Pro 4 does have a 5 year hardware warranty from the date of purchase.
If within 90 days of purchase or have a current ProSupport contract I suggest you give NetGear support a call. Otherwise open a free online support case at my.netgear.com and post your case number (preferably editing the thread title i.e. subject of first post in the thread) to include it.
Also note that the WD diagnostics tool is written by WD. They are not looking to replace disks unless they are pretty bad (same goes for Seagate). The Readynas will reject a disk that could otherwise pass a vendors tests. I have seen this myself several times.
In your case with so many failed disks, I would follow mdgm's advice and first open a support case with Netgear to check the chassis.
