crunchlife: Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2

Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2

Ryan Baxter — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:27:00 -0700

A few weeks ago I began having problems with my Linksys NAS200. At the time, I couldn’t discern whether it was a hard drive failure or a problem with the NAS200’s disk controller. The status message within the NAS200’s administrative panel suggested that the drive had been “removed”. I received no alert message and proceeded to diagnose the problem to the best of my abilities.

After some thought, I devised a plan to back up the remaining good disk, power down the NAS200, and replace Disk 1 with a new hard drive. I purchased an Eagle Consus M-Series external drive enclosure and a spare Western Digital 500 GB hard drive for a total of $102.95. I placed the order last Saturday and UPS delivered the package to my door on the following Tuesday.

Last night I backed up the files on my Linksys NAS200 using the Eagle drive enclosure and a spare 250 GB SATA drive that I had laying around. Transferring the files from my NAS200 to the external drive was painful. At speeds between 900 KB/sec and 1.9 MB/sec, I decided to make a sacrifice and chose not to include my music and movie collection.

Even without my media files the backup still took about nine hours to complete. It’s almost inevitable that my wife is awake at 3 AM. Before bed, I asked her to wake me up so that I could check on the progress of the backup. I didn’t want to risk having the USB drive enclosure overheat and foil my plans. My wife is more cheerful than I am at 3 o’clock in the morning. She woke me up as planned and I stumbled from the bedroom to sit on the floor in front of the NAS200. The backup was complete.

Do not attempt to insert a hard drive into your NAS200 in the dark. Remember the puzzling “ribbon” that I found in each of the drive bays? Well, half of the ribbon is encased in plastic. I didn’t even think about it last night and ended up turning Disk 1’s ribbon into an accordion. In the dark, at 3 AM, I thought the drive was properly seated. I turned on the device and waited. The Disk 2 LED lit up brightly. I waited some more. Disk 1 remained dark. My wife turned on our living room lights and found me squatting on the floor holding the NAS200 inches from my face. Within the glow of the incandescents I could tell what I had just done.

I had to shake the NAS200 (gently) to remove the disk that I had just securely wedged into the first drive bay. Once the drive was removed I decided to try again in the morning. With proper lighting and a few more hours of sleep, I carefully inserted the new drive and pressed the power button. The NAS200 whirred and its lights began blinking. Disk 2… Disk 1… Disk 1! According to what I had previously read, The NAS200’s disk LEDs alternate when mirroring. My NAS200’s lights were doing just that.

After work I noticed that both disk lights were solid indicating that both drives were active. I checked the NAS200’s administrative panel and both drives were listed as “Used by RAID 1”. Satisfied, I mounted the shares and proceeded to browse through my files. Everything was there!

My original NAS200 review has over ninety comments and both the Linksys community forums and linksysinfo.org are filled with posts left by people inquiring about the device. I’ve read a lot of bad reviews and received quite a few disparaging comments regarding the reliability of the NAS200. I bought it knowing it was new on the market. Trusting the Linksys brand name, I figured it’d be a sturdy device and for eighteen months it has been.

It’s just as foolish to rely on a single device as it is a single hard drive for safe file storage. Hardware will always fail. That said, I’ve begun to work on an off-site storage strategy for my home backups. I’ll be posting more on this when I’ve worked out the details.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Ryan Baxter

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:33:33 -0800

Yikes! I can't say for sure. It may be worth a try. You can probably pick up a used NAS200 for a fair price these days. I'd probably try to find a way to mount the drives and do a backup first. You could try a live Linux distro.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by DProc

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:03:53 -0800

Hey Ryan Baxter! I was wondering if you have any pointers. I have a NAS200, and the logic board died. The drives seem to be fine, but of course I can't access the partitions. I was wondering, if I buy a new NAS200 and jam these drives in, do you think they would work? Or do you think the new NAS200 would want to format the drives? Help please!

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by tag1003@gmail.com

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 01:33:03 -0800

My Nas 200 packed up just when i wanted to use the data. The NAs could not be accessed from the network. I now want to take the hard drive and read the data directly - Is that possible ? regards George

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by hmm@some .where

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 04:15:09 -0800

It should be possible to transfer both disks to another lInux host, but no doubt there's a few mdadm tricks to do. A lot of misconception goes around as RAID and large unreliable drives is risky and quite flawed at the outset. The NAS, when it encounters a write error, has to marke the space bad, collect any stored data and write it elsewhere before reportint a problem to the OS (Linux). If a major failure occurs, a disk will be dropped from the array ('degraded') and with any luck it will still work in that form. Once degraded, to bring any file back online, a new disk must be inserted and time given for the data to be copied from the remaining good disk. The larger the disk array's size, the more likely a read or write error will occur and this can prevent the other disk being brought back to life. Best to stick to quality, slow (cool) small disks in a device like this.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by lightnin_jaj@hotmail.com

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:23:43 -0800

I just experienced having the power light and disk lights blinking. Nothing worked until finally I unpluged the NAS, let the HDs cool down then installed them one at a time. It worked for me!!!!

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by recycled products

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:55:24 -0800

This blog Is very informative , I am really pleased to post my comment on this blog . It helped me with ocean of knowledge so I really belive you will do much better in the future.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Alex Aizikov

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:29:40 -0700

Hi Ryan, I guess my experience may come handy for future owners to be of Linksys NAS200... I went 1 step further and purchased another NAS200 box as my personal Disaster Recovery Plan... What could be beter to keep swap box just in case... So I put 2 of my existing RAID 1 drivesfrom my 1.5 years old NAS200 into the same byt brand new box and being all excited turned on the power on..... Hi Ryan, I guess my experience may come handy for future “owners to be” of Linksys NAS200... I went 1 step further and purchased another NAS200 box as my personal Disaster Recovery Plan... What could be better to keep swap box just in case... So I put 2 of my existing RAID 1 drives from my 1.5 years old NAS200 into exactly the same, but brand new box and being all excited turned on the power..... After a while WEB UI showed 2 Unformatted drives and there was no way to access the data, even I restored the config file from my old NAS. The moment I put drives back I was back in business. New box is Ok and works fine as well, but there is no way to re-use the existing RAID 1 on different box. This is very disappointing. BTW, I've tried to mount one of the drives in Linux and in Windows with LINUX volume mounting utilities, results are scary. Bottom line if the original Box fails your data lost forever... This is not the way I would expect my favorite brand Linksys engineers would design Network Attached storage device, that by purpose must be reliable backup and DR solution. Extremely disappointing…….

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Ken Pascoe

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:06:21 -0700

Hey Ryan Well, I've had a NAS200 with two mirrored 1tb Seagates in for just over a year now (note how the warranty period has just expired?) I woke up three days ago to find I could browse the config pages ok, just couldn't access any of the files. Via Windows - network identification error. Via the HTML pages - This URL could not be resolved, etc. Pull the drives out and connected one by one to a linux machine - drives do not even register in the operating system. 800gb of data down the drain at this point, including an extensive music/video library and a lot of files from previous places of work. Did I have a backup - Not really. I had ASSumed that a mirrored array was enough. More fool me. The NAS200 seemed like a cost effective solution at the time. Now I realise it was a CHEAP solution, as in CHEAP AND NASTY. This has not been my first problem with the NAS200 in the last 14 months - but it will be my last. Ken

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Ryan Baxter

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:31:01 -0700

@Robert:
1. No. The NAS200 will format the drive for you.
2. Yes.
3. Sounds like a good plan to me. Just a heads up - the mirroring takes forever and a day. Don't be surprised if you're still waiting 24 hours later. You can check the drive's status in the NAS200's control panel.

Sooner or later I'll write a follow-up post about my offsite backup plan. I've been too busy with summer stuff to blog much.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Robert McInnes

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:25:11 -0700

NAS200 Off-Site Storage Backup Strategy.... Ryan, I am keen to implement an off-site back storage strategy using NAS200 RAID 1. I have purchase a third 500GB Seagate ST3500320NS drive, and would like your confirmation that I simply need to do the following steps... a) shut down [press the power button briefly], and allow NAS200 to shut down. b) disconnect power cable, and remove the lower drive. c) install the new drive [refer User Manual Chapter 2.3], d) reconnect the power cable, and restart NAS200 [press the power button briefly] d) monitor the new drive mirroring process... When complete... e) label [date, status, statistics] and package the old lower drive, and store it Off-Site. My key question... 1) do I need to format the new ST3500320NS drive, or is that taken care of by the NAS200 and/or the mirroring process. Other questions [not important for now]... 2) a year from now, can I repeat this process, to replace the top drive, and create a second Off-Site drive. 3) can I now rotate the four (or three drives) every six to 12 months... I would appreciate your thoughts, and assure you of my support to develop and refine your Off-Site Storage Strategy. Robert

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Ryan Baxter

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:23:40 -0700

Yes, my drives were mirrored. When Disk 1 failed, my files were still safe and sound on Disk 2. I'm still running my NAS200 24x7 and haven't had any further problems. The device does, however, get extremely hot. Sooner or later I'll get around to blogging about my off-site storage strategy. So much to do - so little time.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by tamaker@gmail.com

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:14:38 -0700

Hey, so what about that drive that you got the original error on... did you ever recover all that data or were you already (now that I think about it) runnin it so that they were mirrors (meaning the other disk already had a copy of the failed disk?)) thanks for this, its really helpful. I think I'll start scheduling a power down for my nas 200 daily.... I think I may upgrade to a drobo,but I also hear horror stories about that as well. I think you're right... an off-site solution is a good 'plan B' to have.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by ronallan

Sat, 30 May 2009 01:44:11 -0700

I use a NAS200 as well, mostly for storing non-critical data like videos and MP3s. I use 2 500 GB Seagate drives, configured as separate drives. I'd rather use striping, but I'm wary of losing data if one drive fails. I would like to use mirroring as well, but I can't seem to give up the extra storage space. It's been pretty reliable for me, though I have been using it only for half a year or so, and I don't leave it on all the time, except maybe on weekends. It is PRETTY SLOW though, but I've learned to live with it. Glad to hear you've more or less sorted out the problems with your NAS200. I bought mine too mainly because of the brand name. It's a shame Linksys didn't seem to put much effort into the NAS200.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by Ryan Baxter

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:22:46 -0700

The drives are from Western Digital and, I've been told, have a propensity to fail. They were the cheapest on the market at the time I bought the NAS. The NAS200 is old. There are better, faster devices on the market. I'd review SmallNetBuilder before making a decision. You could also build your own. Check out GitHub and XP-Dev.com for free revision control hosting.

"Linksys NAS200 Disk Failure - Part 2" by safe and sound

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:53:45 -0700

btw, what kind (brand) of harddrive are you using? I didn't see it in your previous post either. I am shopping around and found synology and Linksys (now cisco) are very hack friendly. I wanted my nas to also host subversion or git ^_^ yep, not sure if I would handle hardware 3am in the dark. good luck!