You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.
Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array. This all went fine. The funny thing was I wasn’t able to use the array during the rebuild. It only takes about 8hrs to rebuild the 2TB so it’s no a big deal; It ran while I was at work. Usually, the array is accessible during the rebuild, though it performs a bit slower. When I returned from work I watched it finish up the rebuild and I then tried to access it. No luck. My Mac wouldn’t connect. I then tried it from my 2003 server, same issue. I am only able to access it over NFS on my linux server, read only.
I log into the interface, take a look around and the array and disks are fine. The array is healthy and all my drives are happy. I log into the device over ssh and I find the Thecus has mounted the array as read only and I can’t do anything to change it. Back in the web interface I find about 80% of it isn’t working. The disk and array pages are fine but the pages for users, folder setup, permissions are all not working. When you click to access one of the pages you are presented with a black box that says warning and an OK button, which takes you back to the previous page. Must be some kind of firmware issue.
I download the current firmware, the same version I’m running, and reflash the device. It makes no change what so ever. I tried to find older version but I don’t see any on the Thecus support site. I was able to find some beta versions, but they won’t load anyway. I’m totally stuck.
Data is 100% in tact. All the files and folder are there and accessible over NFS on my linux machine but nothing is editable. I can’t change a file, create a file, or delete a file.
Thecus offers email support, only. They asked me to do the usual, flash the firmware, reboot, run file system checks, ect ect. All of which I had done already but was more than happy to do again. Now, they want SSH access and web access to the device. Yikes. Thecus offers no guarantee that the data is safe, and they are clear that they are not responsible for protecting it. Did I mention Yikes? For all I know they are going to log in, do some kind of low level reset and send me on my way, with a clean empty device.
As you might imagine I have ordered some USB drives to backup the data. I’ll let them log in and take a look around.. but not until I am sure I am safe. Fact of the matter is I don’t trust the device any longer and I am going to have to replace it but no one else offers what they do near that price. Almost all companies only offer their RAID boxes with drives installed… but I already have a fleet of 500GB SATA drives…. and 250GB SATA drives (from an older array… also dead). I don’t want more wasted drives! I want reliable storage!
I’m looking at going with a Norco product called the DS-1220. It’s basically an external SATA box that can show the OS all twelve drives. This would allow me to mange the array myself and not lock me into a specific card and configuration. Might even allow me to use the 2TB array I have now… More research to do….
Any one else have some thoughts?
Topslakr