Thursday, November 21, 2013

ReadyNAS RN104 is a disaster.

You get what you pay for they say. In my upset about almost losing a year's data from my ReadyNAS NV+ I purchased an RN104, Netgear's latest version of "consumer level" NAS. I was kind of hoping that after all these years of development the system software would be more stable than that on the NV+.

After much googling and angst I was finally able to copy my data from the stalled NV+ onto my new 104 and I thought it was all plain sailing after that.

Three weeks later and I'm ready to demand my money back for the 104. It has stalled at least once a day for the past three weeks, sometimes twice, even three times. Thankfully redundancy in the disks has allowed resynching (if it doesn't stall first) so I haven't lost any data (yet) but basically I've got a very power hungry brick. Obviously its performance as a file server is very poor while it's resynching.

I don't think Netgear support has the slightest clue about why it's happening. The ReadyNAS forum  is full of complaints about the stalling. I've filed a support request but so far none of the replies has indicated they have any idea why it stalls.

It might be snapshots, it might be automated backups, it might be power supply under load, it might be the anti-virus software (not enabled in my case), it might be CPU too hot under load...

At the moment my old NV+ is sitting next to the 104 looking very smug. At least it only has unrecoverable stalls once a year or so...

As an indicator of how clueless Netgear support people are, I posted a complaint on the forum about the iTunes server in OS6 being compiled to serve only Windows boxes. It serves up FLAC files with the bytes reversed for a Mac and all one hears is a deafening squeal. "Thanks for the heads up" was the reply from Netgear. They never tested it!