Hard drive dead and unit won't start up

[armornone]

Hi.

My readynas 600 won't boot up. I check each drive using seatools and one of the drives failed the generic short drive test.

What should I do now? Can I start the raid system up without that drive to see if the unit will start up now?

Could 1 failed drive cause the unit to freeze and not boot up?

The hard drive is operational however has failed test.

Please advise?

Thanks.

[armornone]

I have a bug to report to the wizards at readynas about their system.

Apparently a particularly dead drive can bring down the system. I had a Hitachi death star hard drive which is spinning and somewhat functioning however it dead in the sense that it failed the seatools self drive test. This particularly functioning and particually dead drive preventing my Readynas from ever turning on. It just sat there and waited all night without ever booting up.

I removed this drive and booted up my system which came right on. So this zombie dead drive cause the entire problem. Maybe everyone here should avoid those Hitchi deathstar drives, my drive only had a few hours on it and died completely without warning. No clicking sound, no motor dying, nothing. It just one minute and was dead the next.

[mdgm]

Hitachi drives should be tested using Hitachi's tools not SeaGate's SeaTools. However from your description it's pretty clear that the drive is dead.

Drives can and do fail at any time (which is one reason why backups - e.g. to a USB disk - are important). Unfortunately sometimes this can cause the NAS to hang.

[armornone]

Hitachi drives should be tested using Hitachi's tools not SeaGate's SeaTools. However from your description it's pretty clear that the drive is dead.

Drives can and do fail at any time (which is one reason why backups - e.g. to a USB disk - are important). Unfortunately sometimes this can cause the NAS to hang.

I tried to reset it many times and leave it on for hours at a time. Too bad the software can't say, "hey, this drive is not providing the requested information for 12 hours, maybe its bad"

Well, at least I was able to recover from the potential data loss thanks to the power of RAID.

[mdgm]

Normally the NAS will detect a disk failure while the NAS is running. However as disks can and do fail at any time however if the NAS is off, if there is a bad disk when the NAS boots it will cause the boot process to hang. Some short tests are run on boot up but these may in some cases not detect a failing disk. You can monitor the NAS in RAIDar (http://www.readynas.com/downloads) on boot and hover the mouse over the disk LEDs looking for ATA errors.

[rdepas]

I have used 4 different ReadyNAS units. Had failed drives in the 1100 and 2100 and every time the system has just hung. No warning emails and Raidar showed nothing. The 2100 just went offline again and it is really frustrating. I am using this as a VMware datastore. I have backups - that isn't the issue...the issue is it should NOT hang there is a bad drive. It should fail that drive out of the RAID and warn via indicators and emails like every other NAS out there. I am running Western Digital Black so these are very good drives. Now I will have to go onsite and use trial and error to find the failed drive. Until then, the client is down...

[mdgm]

In most cases the NAS shouldn't be taken down by a bad drive however as drives can and do fail at any time and in different ways and unfortunately in some cases this can cause the system to hang. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.

[rdepas]

In most cases the NAS shouldn't be taken down by a bad drive however as drives can and do fail at any time and in different ways and unfortunately in some cases this can cause the system to hang. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.

This is the 5th drive I have had fail and the 5th time the system just hung. I have NEVER had a warning or failed drive just dropped out of the RAID to allow the system to keep running. There is something not right in the system or firmware that it is not correctly identifying failing/failed drives and removing them from the RAID and providing a warning. This has been an issue for years. I have worked with the engineers at Netgear years ago on the first two failed drives in hopes the issue would be corrected. I run other NAS/SAN systems that do not have this issue - why can't Netgear ReadyNAS units properly identify failed drives? That is the real issue. We all know drives can fail at any time, that is why we are running a RAID. The function of the RAID is to provide high availability in the case where a drive fails.

[mdgm]

I've had one disk failure on a NV+ and I was informed that the disk failed the SMART self-assessment test. Not a big sample I know.