For several weeks now I have been having issues with my ReadyNAS 1100, its been running perfectly for the longest time. I made the upgrade from 4 x 1TB drives to 4 x 2TB drives, with X-Raid configuration I get about 5.55 TB worth of storage on my Network Area Storage device. Overall the ReadyNAS is a fantastic and extremely durable piece of hardware with great support from Netgear if you have any issues that needs warranty replacement. The best part of owning the ReadyNAS is its user base, the online forums have such a wealth of information that you are always helped by someone more experience, be it a network issues or a hardware issues. In my case I began facing issues with it, any file bigger then 400 MB it would hang in the beginning of transfer, from “30 seconds” to “2 minutes” to “55 minutes” then it would just hang.

First thing I did was check health status and go through the logs several times, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, there were no bad sectors on the hard drives. So I kept checking network for issues, changing different network components, even giving the PC a direct connection to the ReadyNAS mounted on the rack to test it, but I still got the same transfer issue. After going to the forums I found someone with the same issue but going into extreme detail in the forum, told me where to check the Hard Drives for the “Smart +” status and see if there are any issues, and turns out one of the drives recently had over 65000+ Raw Error Rate which would lead me to agree that there is an issue with the drive, a way to test it is to take it out and try another transfer to see if the files transfers without issues.

Turns out the drive that had issues is a drive that had ATA errors that increased to about 6 over time. When I took out the drive and did a transfer turns out that it was the faulty drive. Luckily I already had a spare Hitachi 2 TB drive that I inserted to replace it. Now the annoying process is going through the HD replacement with Hitachi even though it is warrantied for 5 years they are making this a very annoying process, unlike Western Digital who make it such a simple process, Hitachi is annoying with all their back and forth but I will get my Hard Drive RMAed and replaced!