New ReadyNAS Pro en route
by Volker Weber
Exactly one week ago, my ReadyNAS Pro died. It dropped off the network, and when I went looking for it, it would not make a sound. Dead, dead, dead.
I contacted Netgear and they asked me to send it in. Sent out Friday, arrived Monday. Yesterday they told me, they were unable to fix it and were going to replace it. Today I got my UPS tracking number and if all goes well, the new machine should be here tomorrow.
The plan is simple. Unpack the machine, insert the drives in the correct sequence, wire the box up and start it. Everything should be back to normal.
A week is quite long without primary storage. But I had made plans earlier. There is a second, slower ReadyNAS for background storage. It has all the data of the ReadyNAS Pro. And on top of that, there are backups.
Can you get at your data, when parts of your infrastructure fail?
Comments
I can get at parts of my data at least. :)
Does it really matter, in which sequence the drives are inserted? I have worked with an enterprise RAID rack in the past few weeks and our subcontractor told us that a certain sequence is not really necessary. Especially our admins didn't believe him but since there was not any valuable data on the drives yet, I tried it out, switched a few drives, and it still worked. Though this could be because it's enterprise level. ;)
I currently have an old IcyBox, which I don't really like. It doesn't have hot swap bays, the network performance in RAID 1 is quite low, the processing power is quite low as well, so it can't run many additional services...
I've been oogling the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 case for a few weeks now, but I haven't made up my mind yet. If I buy it, then definitely only with new 2TB drives and the IcyBox will then serve as a backup-backup for really important data.
Frankly, I don't know. I know where the drives were originally, and I am going to put them back in that place. If I were to program a RAID, I would put sequence numbers on the drives, so that they can indeed be swapped around, but I am not going to try my luck.
Can you get at your data, when parts of your infrastructure fail?
I filter the really vital bits through lpr, so yes. :-) Kidding aside, yes, I can get at my data when most of the infrastructure fails, thanks to duplication and backups.
Well, if I ever buy one of those hot swap bay cases then I will definitely try this out before I store any vital data on it. But I guess in the end I will still make sure to put every drive back in its original slot, should a situation such as yours arise, just to be on the safe side. :)
At home: Absolutely, 100%, yes.
In the Office: I hope so :-)
Absolutely. Development laptop backs up two ways:
1) Daily backup of all data to a server share.
1a) Server does weekly complete backup to Buffalo Terastation, and daily incremental backups.
2) Weekly ghost image of primary drive created on eSATA connected HDD.
I love the Terastation, but am very interested in the NetGear ReadyNAS.
Yes. Even tested it regularly!
"Can you get at your data, when parts of your infrastructure fail?"
Yes!
The one thing that will be missing are the backups of the machines, data will be there to be accesed.
But in case of failure i won't have to wait that long :)
Hm, there's no edit-button. I just read about data in office in the comments.
in office it's 100% yes. If not, i think i will be sacked..
Yup at home - two Synology NAS, one mirrors the other, plus backups. (Actually at the moment everything is particularly redundant as part of our phased move to Spain)
@"The plan is simple. Unpack the machine, insert the drives in the correct sequence, wire the box up and start it. Everything should be back to normal."
No address/port and configuration of additional services? Don't want to be a smart alec, but uploading the saved configuration sounds helpful for me too. ;-)
It's all on the disks.
Just to answer the question from the beginning of this thread: Yes, on the ReadyNAS the order of the disks is important.
Thanks for clearing that up, Stefan!
@It's all on the disks.
Hm, did I miss something? Never touched the ReadyNAS, but how does it get to the systems configuration pane?
As this normally is just a file import it isn't a big deal, so in general you're right. In my opinion Netgear showed a notably good service level here.
Yup, asynchronous replication with zfs send/receive protected with ipsec on a second box roughly 500 km away.
