N3200 RAID5 Dissapeared

[pagey]

Hey all,

I recently purchased a Thecus N3200 for home use after recommending and installing several N5200's for customers of the past year or so. I wanted some storage I could rely on at home to protect my photos, work data etc, and somewhere to dump all my music. While it can be a quirky product at times I have found it to be so far ahead of the competition in terms of value that I couldn't really justify choosing anything else for home.

After several bad experiences with both Seagate and WD hard drives lately (i.e total drive failures, including Raid edition drives) I opted for 3 x Samsung HD753LJ - 750Gb, 7200rpm, 32Mb Cache.

I plugged in my shiny new N3200, carefully installed my 3 drives, logged in, setup my RAID5, went to bed, got up, RAID Status OK, excellent! Power it down and up a few times using both the front power button (with the OK, to confirm) and the web interface, the RAID Array remained persistent, looking good!

Created a few shares, configured some permissions, copied a few test files around from and to the NAS, running nice and fast, I was happy it was ready.

So I copied my entire photo collection (dating back the last 12 years), and my entire Music collection.

Everything was fine for a week, then one morning I got up powered on the NAS (i had been away for 2 days so I had shut it down while I was away), sat at my computer, click my shortcut to the NAS, not responding, strange i thought. Looked at the LCD on the NAS, and raid status is N/A, the 3 drive indicators are green, logged into the web interface and my only option is to create a new array, nothing in the logs. Powered it off and back on, same thing...........

I now notice that the 1st HDD inidicator is staying orange for a while longer than the other drives, then going green, so I log into the web interface and the 1st drive is no longer appearing in the drive list, i removed it from the array (physcially), plugged it into an external PSU and USB->Sata connector, plug it into my PC and bang it detects the drive and brings it up (Obviously I didnt initiate the disk or modify it in any way, just a test to see if it was dead).

So i put the drive back into the array (the Top drive, #1), power it on, stil the same.

Not good.... i thought, not good...

I am in the process of undeleting the files I moved from their original drives, which is going to take quite some time.

So I have lodged a support ticket with thecus, and have had a response requesting me to configure remote access, which is fine (although I am not sure I will bother).

BUT, the whole idea of the thing is to have somewhere safe to store my data, so if they fix it..... so what!

If I can't rely on it to safely protect my data, which is why i bought the thing in the first place, then it is no good to me at all. If there is something wrong with drive #1 then thats fine, I shouldn't have lost my array, that is the idea of RAID5, I get to lose 1 drive before I lose all my data.

not sure what I am going to do now, it will take alot convincing for me to trust this product enough to store my valuable data on again.

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

Current we didn't get your feeback from esupport ticket, hope we could access to this N3200 and verify possible issue course and get the RAID back.

[mep1hs]

I am having a very similar problem to this with my brand new N3200, and with 3 new 1000 GB Western Digital WD1000FYPS RE2-GP drives.

The RAID 5 takes about 18 hours to configure the stripes. I copy some test files across and it seems quite happy for half a day or so. Then then it wakes me up in the middle of the night with its beeping noise telling me the RAID is degraded.

I've repeated the process a few times and moved the drive around between different slots and the same thing happens every time. I look at the RAID configuration and it is always the same drive that gets dropped from the RAID.

Before stumbling onto this forum I concluded that I've got a faulty drive, but it seems it could be a fault with N3200. I know that this particular drive is not in the HCL, so I'm not sure if I'd get any support from Thecus on this one.

I am sending back, what seems like the problematic drive back, but I'm afraid they're going to turn around and say that there's no fault with the drive and I'd have to bear the cost of redelivery.

I have not got a PC to put this drive in to perform a diagnostics either...

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

Due to WD1000FYPS RE2-GP is a new model and we didn't tested, thus we afraid confirm the ompatibility with N3200.
Following N3200 HDD list for your reference:
http://esupport.thecus.com/support/i...id=23&nav=0,47

[helgebernd]

I have the same problems ,
3 X SAMSUNG HD501LJ and raid 5... the "N3200 Hard Disk Compatibility Test Report" means the samsung hdd is fine. The N3200 works good when I copy some small files for testing but when I want fill the harddisks with music (100GB) at any time the N3200 shows "no response" on the display an beep.

what is the problem

[rajverhoeven]

Hi,

i have the N3200 for 6 months. i upgraded the HD's to 3x western digitial 500GB SE16.

i have also the problem that is was working ok when i uploaded a few GIGs but after trying to upload 70GB the system told me: system not responding (on the n3200)

what must i do? the beep is on and i can only get the power cord out of the wall.

its know rebuilding raid again... i hope it will get to the 100% before the "system not responding" kicks in

what can i do to avoid these problems?

rene

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

Get such issue about no response or RAID missing, please sumbit a ticket from Thecus Technology Corp. - Thecus eSupport Center and the priority higher than forums.

Yvon.

[Thecus - Yvon]

Dear Sir,

Get such issue about no response or RAID missing, please sumbit a ticket from http://esupport.thecus.com/support/ and the priority higher than forums.

Yvon.

[helgebernd]

Hallo,
there can be a solution with new firmware 1.00.04
...thecus.com/product_firmware.php?cid=12&pid=48&set_language=english

[Thecus - Yvon]

http://www.thecus.com/Downloads/beta..._1.00.04.1.bin
http://www.thecus.com/Downloads/beta..._1.00.04.1.txt

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