N5200 Pro - WD20EADS 2TB Upgrade nightmare - Please help

[knowlr]

Hi All

I wonder if someone could help. I have a Thecus N5200 Pro with 5x Seagate Enterprise 750GB disks. I have just bought 5x WD20EADS 2tb disks to expand my system.

I read through the forums and I seem to have combinations of various problems. the steps so far are...

1) Upgraded N5200 to latest firmware V2.01.09
2) Removed 1 disk (hot swapped) and replaced with 2tb disk, reinserted. RAID shows as degraded and then started to show progress with rebuilding. Got to 1% and stopped. Display showed rebuild but with no progress indicator at all.
3) Rebooted and drive no longer came up in Storage>Disk. Even though it was present in tray.
4) Realised I'd probably screwed my data (I have a backup) so tried different tack.
5) Rebooted system, placed each drive in one ata time to see if they would show up in storage>disk. All did (4x750Gb) EXCEPT new 2tb disk.
6) Tried drive in different trays - still didn't show up.
7) Thought firmware might be an issue so downgraded to 2.00.10 - (someone in forum reported WD20EADS working with this firmware).
8) Placed all 2tb disks in after shutting down. Brought N5200 up - found all but one of the drives.
9) Created new RAID - left it overnight - just showed formatting with no CPU loading and no progress indication. Shut down Thecus.
10) Restarted - checked storage>disks>OK and one of the drives didn't seem to have any information.

Result - 5 drives started with, now down to 3 that the N5200 can see and report information on.

Please help I can't afford to destroy 5 disks!

Cheers
Rob

[Funkstar]

According to the HDD compatability list, these are supported as of 15-04-09.

Can you connect them to your PC and use the WD utilities to check they are not faulty?

Component failure is usually represented by a Bathtub Curve so it is possible one or more has gone bad.

[knowlr]

Hi

Thanks for answering! I can't check them as all my computers are sealed Macs (one of the drawbacks!) so I have nowhere to attach them to.

I have set the 3 working disks in the N5200 and am creating a new RAID with just the 3. Seems to be working - disk activity and CPU utilisation.

Will update and see - but you could be right - dodgy disks may be at fault. My worry came because one of them worked until I put it in and the Thecus tried to rebuild the array - then it stopped!

I guess I couldn't comprehend that 2 out of 5 disks were bad!

Cheers
Rob

[Funkstar]

How about begging a favour from a friend or using a PC at work to check them?

I've had a couple of drives that had a few bad sectors straight off or developed them withing days of being used. RMAed them without an issue and the current ones have been going strong ever since.

[knowlr]

Problem solved by replacing two of the disks. Now one of the disks shows current pending sectors and RAID formatting shows no progress.

Can you create a RAID with current pending sectors?

[knowlr]

Its official - the Thecus N5200 Pro is bricking my hard disk drives. Had two replacements sent each time the following occurs:

1) Delete RAID
2) Install new HDD (4 work fine).
3) Power on
4) Thecus see all disks, all OK.
5) Create RAID with XFS (128Kb) stripe master raid.
6) Gets stuck on formatting for 48 hours.
7) Eventually reset by holding down power button on front
8) Switch on again
9) Disk makes clicking sound and Theucs can no longer see it.

This thing has cost be £1k in 2tb disks one of which is now useless and as the system cannot seeem to cope with 5 2TB disks the entire investment is useless.

DO NOT USE 2TB in Thecus N5200 they do not work and the Thecus unit actually damages the disk drives.

I don;t expect any help from Thecus at all judging by comments in the forum. Thank you for the few that helped - if anyone has any other ideas please let me know - I'll be in the garden setting fire to £2.5k worth of kit.

[deluxx]

Its official - the Thecus N5200 Pro is bricking my hard disk drives. Had two replacements sent each time the following occurs:

1) Delete RAID
2) Install new HDD (4 work fine).
3) Power on
4) Thecus see all disks, all OK.
5) Create RAID with XFS (128Kb) stripe master raid.
6) Gets stuck on formatting for 48 hours.
7) Eventually reset by holding down power button on front
8) Switch on again
9) Disk makes clicking sound and Theucs can no longer see it.

This thing has cost be £1k in 2tb disks one of which is now useless and as the system cannot seeem to cope with 5 2TB disks the entire investment is useless.

DO NOT USE 2TB in Thecus N5200 they do not work and the Thecus unit actually damages the disk drives.

I don;t expect any help from Thecus at all judging by comments in the forum. Thank you for the few that helped - if anyone has any other ideas please let me know - I'll be in the garden setting fire to £2.5k worth of kit.

I'm in the same situation. We bought 5 of the WD 2TB drives, 1 is bricked and the other one has some bad sectors. I'll probably rma the two drives. I was trying to create a raid 5 with 4 disks and a hot spare. I am currently running bad sector scans on the 4 hard drives. Have you tested/scanned each of your drives?

[deluxx]

Have you tried changing TLER?

[deluxx]

Looks like I'm in the same boat, I had 3 good drives which I enabled the TLER on each drive, verified that each drive was good with Western Digital's diagnostic tools and started to create a raid and now I have 2 good drives and 1 bad one.

From 5 good drives down to 2. Thank goodness for RMA.

WD20EADS 2TB drives are not compatible with the N5200B Pro firmware v2.01.09. I recommend using the Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 1TB drives since that raid has been stable for almost a year with no build problems.

[Pskone]

Guys, I started with 7 WD 1.5TB green drives and had 2 bad ones within the first week, even with TLER enabled at the default of r7 w7 it kept dropping them and could not deal with the bad sectors. Having a 3rd one give current pending sectors. Testing with WD DLG corrected the bad sectors but the NAS still thought they were suspect, I believe it keeps track of them separately and it didn't know about the work WD DLG had done. Using the latest N7700 firmware I did a bad sector test and it dropped the drive from the array. I've dropped the TLER timeout to r5 w5 and the NAS now accepts the drive, does a full surface scan and has cleared them all up.

I believe that the Thecus OS times out below the regular 7 seconds and you need to use lower TLER settings. Give it a go and see if the NAS behaves better and can actually scan and mark sectors as bad without dropping the drives, I'd be interested to hear the results because my current drive does not actually have bad sectors, the N7700 just tagged some as possibly bad (i.e. pending and to be investigated more).

[knowlr]

After much faffing about and opening and closing of Thecus support tickets, I have observed the following:

1) Firmware version 2.00.16 works with WD20EADS 2Tb drives formatted as EXT3 at 64kb stripe.
- This means 8Tb limit so a bit of a waste.
- Drives been up for a few days now with no errors and am currently stresssing them with long copies

2) Latest firmware damages drives. Simple as that. Formatting WD20EADS with the latest firmware cauess Thecus to crash and a hard reboot is required. When it crashes it seems to lock the disk itself into continuous formatting. At this point either the heads melt into the disk or when its reset they crash into the disk permanently damaging it - forever.

3) Thecus were unable to give me any help beyond downgrading my firmware. They stated 2tb drives had been tested but could not say at what firmware version. they don't seem to have any 2tb to hand to test.

4) Be really careful - I was lucky and RMA'd a number of disks (4 out 5). Only use 2tb disks that you can RMA or you will get very poor very quickly.

I am now consdiering my overall stategy with regards to the Thecus N5200.

[deluxx]

Thecus recommended that I try out their beta firmware v2.01.10.6. At the time I had only two good drives so with their beta firmware I created a raid 0 which completed fine. I did not any full stress test just a few file copies (250 MB) and it works fine. I just received 2 replacements drives and will create a raid 5 with my 4 drives in the next couple days. I also RMA'd another drive which I should get a replacement back in a couple weeks. I will post my results regarding the raid 5 with the beta firmware.

[deluxx]

Thecus recommended that I try out their beta firmware v2.01.10.6. At the time I had only two good drives so with their beta firmware I created a raid 0 which completed fine. I did not any full stress test just a few file copies (250 MB) and it works fine. I just received 2 replacements drives and will create a raid 5 with my 4 drives in the next couple days. I also RMA'd another drive which I should get a replacement back in a couple weeks. I will post my results regarding the raid 5 with the beta firmware.

Here is an update. The beta firmware v2.01.10.6 seems to fix the issues where it would hang on creating/building a raid. The raid 5 building completed fine and has been stable since last friday. I also have TLER enabled on the drives, read and write set to the default 7 seconds. I don't plan to test it with TLER disabled and don't want to take a chance of having the raid creating breaking the drives.

I did a few 100 GB file reads and writes to make sure it is ok. Don't have the time to do any more.

So to summarize -

Beta Firmware v2.01.10.6 works with Western Digital 2 TB (WD20EADS) Drives
Raid 5 (4 used drives + 1 spare)

Usable Disk Space - 5407.1 GB
Raid 5 Total Disk Space (4 drives) - 5583.4 GB

Single Drive Raw Disk Space - 1907.7 GB
5 Drives Raw Disk Space - 9538.6 GB

[cramfs]

Thanks so much for posting all this stuff about the 2Tb WD drives. I have 3*1tb currently and working like a dream until started getting warnings on one of the drives.. I was like.. oh poo need to get another drive just in case it goes cactus...

so looked seriously at the 2Tb.. was either going to systematically replace the 1TB and then expand or go the whole hog and replace the lot, setup raid 10 or watever the option was to have 2 drive failures.

Seems like from all the posts that there could be dramas.. I can in no way afford to lose my data, or even slightly risk it... hence why bought the damn thing in the first place.

For now I am going to get a couple of 1TB drives, mark one as a spare and then upgrade to 2tb when both the prices are better and I hear perfect results from others.

Thanks again guys, I am so glad I checked this site out.

[Astralon]

I also have problems with 2TB disks in a N5200PRO.
The box has 5 disks from Western Digital (WD2002FYPS) and a RAID 5 is configured.
When I bought the box it was running firmware 2.01.09 but I was adviced by Thecus to downgrade because I had I/O errors on every single disk. I have been in touch with them but so far without luck.

However it seems that other people are able to run the same configuration with success.
See also (please put an http: in front, I'm not allowed to post URL's) :
//forums.hexus.net/thecus-care-hexus/162530-7700-wd-re4-gp-wd2002fyps.html#post1755885

[deluxx]

Here is an update. The beta firmware v2.01.10.6 seems to fix the issues where it would hang on creating/building a raid. The raid 5 building completed fine and has been stable since last friday. I also have TLER enabled on the drives, read and write set to the default 7 seconds. I don't plan to test it with TLER disabled and don't want to take a chance of having the raid creating breaking the drives.

I did a few 100 GB file reads and writes to make sure it is ok. Don't have the time to do any more.

So to summarize -

Beta Firmware v2.01.10.6 works with Western Digital 2 TB (WD20EADS) Drives
Raid 5 (4 used drives + 1 spare)

Usable Disk Space - 5407.1 GB
Raid 5 Total Disk Space (4 drives) - 5583.4 GB

Single Drive Raw Disk Space - 1907.7 GB
5 Drives Raw Disk Space - 9538.6 GB

After a few months of running with no problems. I now have the n5200 reporting 2 bad drives with bad sectors. It was configured as a raid 6, performed bad block scans on the drives which came back ok. I pulled that bad drives and put them back in, rebuild was good but after a day the same drives are reported as bad again. We are going to replace all 5 drives, can't take the risk of the Western Digital drives dropping again. Anyone having any luck with Samsung, Seagate, or Hitachi 2TB drives? No other 2TB drives on the Thecus HDD Compability list except for the WDs currently having problems with.