n7700 - to 2TB or not ?

[tristratos]

Just a few months ago, Thecus officially announced 2TB support for their products (Including n7700 NAS)
(http://www.thecus.com/news_contentx....nguage=english)

forcing some users like me to purchase such hard drives for their systems!
Now Thecus, removed those drives from their latest n7700 NAS HDD compatibility chart!
(http://www.thecus.com/Downloads/HDD_...2009-08-19.pdf)

WHAT IS GOING ON ? Make up you minds!

People waiting for your support team to fix any errors and provide a working solution for those gigantic drives.
Not to say that this must have happened even right BEFORE releasing a Press Release of that kind for marketing reasons!

Please don't get me wrong! I am a happy customer of yours, but this kind of behaviour to your customers just turn me (and I guess others) away!!

THECUS, Please get this fixed asap!

[philhu]

Well, I am not happy

I spent $2500 on 8 of these. Now they are unsupported.

7 are working fine but I am afraid to toucn my N7700

So I just replaced it with a Dell Poweredge 1950/MD1000, redundant power supplies, etc, etc

Dell runs Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with NFS enhancements for Unix connections

Backed it all up from the Thecus to USB disks
Brought up the Dell, it sees all the disks. I built it as a Raid-6 with 1 hotspare.

Copied all 2.7 TB of data from the backup disks to the new system.

Works like a charm, has built in shadow copies, built in backups, web browser interface.

It uses a HARDWARE RAID chip, not siftware.

Copies from system on Gig Ethernet is 88MB/s (Mega byte, not bit)
Copy to system (raid writes) is 77MB/s

Best Thecus did, same net and data, read from Thecus, 54MB/s, write 18MB/s

So, thanks Thecus. I am relegating the Thecus to a backup slave system with 1tb drives.

And a few days later, with huge i/o benchmarks running for hours, 0 disk errors.

Thanks for the fish

[doubeld1979]

if i a was you, i shall wait! I hope also that is fixed soon!

[philhu]

ok, did full consistency check in my Dell box with the 8 2tb disks.

No HW errors ever., not one reported, not even soft read warning.

Thecus, DELL does something pretty unique, if they DO find a error during rebuild, instead of losing all your data, they continue the rebuild at a throttled speed, so you don't lose all your data..

[tristratos]

Any _official_ announcement about the issue ?
Is Thecus looking into it ?

IVAN ?

[Thecus - Ivan]

Dear tristratos,

We are currently working on the new firmware for N7700 and N8800.

We will update the HDD compatibility list again when the firmware is ready.

_____________________________

Official Thecus Support Representative

[philhu]

Ivan

You should continue the rebuild after a bad sector, then mark the array still degraded. As it is, a second failure will kill all your data

If a few blocks or a block or two fails, LEAVE THE DATA AS AVAILABLE!

[doubeld1979]

thanks thecus-ivan, i was getting angry about hearing nothing about this problem! you make my day!

[tristratos]

So IVAN/ THECUS what is the case with this ?

Is there any official announcement for this issue ? Is the problem fixed ?
I've seen that there are beta firmwares flying around but NO official release as of yet.

Any official announcement regrading the issue is highly appreciated!