4 disk RAID 5 in N4100+

[bacchus]

I bought a N4100+ and installed 4 Samsung 500 GB HDD (HD501LJ).
Firmware version 2.0.03. These disks are in the list of compatible disks for the N4100+. After configuring RAID 5 over the 4 disks and waiting for over 12 hours, the RAID info page showed the RAID as healthy but both capacity & % used as N/A.

I tried copying files to it but got an error message after < 50 MB.

I rebooted the N4100+ and now the RAID info page shows capacity as 1.4TB but the RAID is running in Degraded mode. Now disk activity is shown by the LED on the front panel and all disks appear on the DISK page.

I have noticed that other folk are having problems running 4 disks in RAID 5 but thought that this referred only to the N4100.

Have I bought a lemon?

Any ideas?

---Bacchus

[marty]

Can you copy and remove files from N4100+ now?

[ido]

bacchus: Check your hard drives to make sure the SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking) is not factory enabled. Your server will have trouble with them if it is enabled. I am using 4 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drives in my N4100 and having no problems with it running in raid 5. Did you have a power shut down during RAID building? This would cause both capacity and % used to display as N/A. In such a case you would have to manually remove the RAID and rebuild it again.

Also, do you still have the factory memory module in the NAS? Some people have upgraded to a bigger memory module which appears to work well but has caused system instability and data loss.

[bacchus]

Thanks for your reply.

I now think that 2 out of the 4 Samsung disks were faulty. I returned the 4100+ to the supplier and it only cost me a 15% restocking fee to get rid of it.

The fact that the 4100+ did not indicate which disks were faulty is a problem I configured the same disk as a raid5 array using fedora7 on an old PC I had and found the bad disks.

I'll mark this down to experience and avoid any Thecus product in future. They sound too good to be true and are.

[foxile]

ido said:

Check your hard drives to make sure the SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking) is not factory enabled.

If this is enabled, is there a way of turning it off, just in case my drives have a problem ??

My 4100+ is being shipped here with 4 x Hitachi Deskstar 7K500.