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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 16, 2006 3:45:01 GMT 7
I am still having major issues with my N5200BR. The latest one being the following. I do professional photography on the side. Last night I attempted to copy all of my photos over to the N5200BR. Reliable photo storage using RAID-5 was the main reason for my purchase of the N5200BR. About one out of every two photos in certain folders have data corruption that shows up in the form of "banding" and "color shifting". I will attempt to upload a before-and-after example of both. Please be aware that I hold the copyright to the photos so please don't steal them ;-) The Image from Before the Data Transfer: www.howiehechtphoto.com/thecus/468_6842-BEFORE.JPGThe Image from After the Data Transfer: www.howiehechtphoto.com/thecus/468_6842-AFTER.JPGI copied the files from a local hard disk to the NAS Volume by selecting a bunch of folders and doing a copy in Windows Explorer from my WinXP Pro system to the N5200BR. Upon further review of some of the corrupted files, they show a different on-disk size when compared to their source file. Thankfully I only did a copy and not a move, and had not yet deleted the originals. Has anyone experienced this or know what may be causing it? This is the last straw for me. If I do not have a completely satisfactory response from eAegis and/or Thecus on this I will be demanding my money back in full for this unit. Thanks in advance for your help!
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jamis
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Posts: 109
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Post by jamis on Oct 16, 2006 8:15:23 GMT 7
I haven't experienced this.
Do you also see this when copying over FTP or HTTP?
How about when copying in small batches or one file at a time?
Have you tried copying using on the command line using xcopy with the /V option?
Have you experienced any corruptions when copying other types of files?
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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 17, 2006 10:37:34 GMT 7
I have not yet tried anything else.
At this point my confidence in the device is shot to hell, and I'm at the point where I'm ready to ask for a full refund and be done with it. I'll give eAegis and Thecus one last chance to redeem themselves. However getting me to entirely trust the N5200BR with my work is a stretch right now. I mean, I copied the files over, Windows said it copied ok, and the files are there -- but they were somehow altered and corrupted during the copy.
In terms of alternate solutions, I am in a tough spot. I require (by my own mandate) RAID-5 to store my photos. I have a great system (Athlon 2800+ on a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with 1GB RAM running XP Pro SP2), but it only has PCI slots, no PCI-x, so my choices are limited in terms of SATA RAID controllers because I'd prefer not to sink money into an older PCI card (versus PCI-x) and I'd also prefer not to have to upgrade my entire system at this point. The way I see it, upgrading would require, at minimum, a new motherboard, new memory, and a new video card at the very least, plus would require the SATA RAID controller -- and I'm not sure I can stretch the $700 quite that far, nor do I want to spend even more on this endeavor. Plus I'd have to do a complete reinstall of everything, something that, while healthy to do every now and then, I just don't have the time or patience to do right now.
A friend, colleague, and mentor of mine in the storage industry warned me that NAS was riddled with issues and suggested I stay away from it, I should have listened.
Suggestions welcome, on both the issue at hand as well as alternate solutions.
Help help help helphelphelphelpppppp....
Thanks!
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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 17, 2006 11:42:54 GMT 7
WARNING: THECUS IS AWARE OF THIS PROBLEM AND WILL BE ADDRESSING IT WITH A BETA FIRMWARE RELEASE.
I AM LIVID THAT THEY DID NOT COMMUNICATE THIS TO THEIR USERS AS SOON AS THEY FOUND OUT ABOUT IT. HOW CAN YOU HAVE A DATA STORAGE DEVICE THAT YOU CAN'T TRUST TO NOT CORRUPT YOUR DATA?!?!?
MORE UPDATES TO FOLLOW AS I FIND OUT MORE
All I can say is that Thecus is VERY lucky none of my work was permanently lost. I hope this issue has not negatively affected any other Thecus users.
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Post by mwk on Oct 17, 2006 15:32:54 GMT 7
Try install Windoze on it
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jamis
Full Member
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Post by jamis on Oct 17, 2006 19:39:16 GMT 7
I agree that data corruption in unacceptable on a storage device. It completely defeats the purpose of the device.
For those of us who have yet to experience data corruption, I sure hope the new firmware (if and when it arrives) does not require the RAID set to be rebuilt.
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Post by N2100Owner on Oct 17, 2006 23:55:28 GMT 7
How did you copy the files? Drag and drop from Window Explorer to a network drive or using Windows command prompt?
How many files and folders are you trying to copy at a time? How many files do you have in a folder?
Did you try the same file copy to another server or Windows machine?
If you can be more specific, people can try to duplicate the same operations on their machines.
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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 18, 2006 4:36:14 GMT 7
All great questions.
First, an update/correction: According to Thecus they are now saying that they do not know of any data corruption issue; what they MEANT to say was that they know of the unit temporarily dropping off of the network during certain snapshot operations -- which I am not using. Apparently the new firmware only addresses the snapshot issue.
Now, to answer some of your questions:
I copied roughly 90,000 files (mostly JPG, some RAW files, some ZIP files) to the N5200BR amounting to over 150GB of data. (150GB is a guess, I can check when I get home.)
I copied them by selecting a top-level folder in Windows Explorer, selecting Copy off of the right-click menu, and then navigating to a folder in the destination volume on the N5200BR and selecting Paste off of the right-click menu.
The deepest folder structure was probably 5 or 7 folders deep -- no more than that.
The largest folder probably had about 1500 files in it, with probably a few sub-folders with equal to or fewer files in it.
The largest file may have been as large as 50-100MB (under 20 of such files if I had to guess), but most of them are in the 2-4MB range (let's say 80+% of them), a bunch that are much smaller (50kb-200kb), let's say 15%), and some of the rest sized group around 10-20MB each.
First I copied a smaller group of files, about 15GB or so, in the above manner. Once it completed I copied the rest.
I did look at the files on the source and they were not corrupt. See the links above in my original posting for one example. Note that I resized those files and posted the smaller versions and not the high-res versions, which are each about 3MB. The corrupt file is smaller than the original by a few KB. I will also try to copy some of the files in question to different media and look for any corruption there, but since the source files are in tact and can be read just fine by my image viewer, I don't see any reason they would be the issue.
It is worth noting that I have seen this sort of corruption once before many years ago (on a different PC) and it had to do with a bad memory card and/or bad card reader.
Thecus Support wants me to ship them my unit with my hard drives in them (and eAegis agrees), but I'm really not comfortable doing that. The saga continues...
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jamis
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Post by jamis on Oct 18, 2006 6:13:21 GMT 7
If you do send it back and are feeling wary due to having your IP/work being 'poached', I'd probably delete all but a few corrupted files (in their original directory structure) from the device, or delete everything and just copy a few sample files and hope for another corruption on that transfer. NAS in general has been around for quite a while... its these new low end boxes that are relatively new to market. Most of them, Thecus included, are simply small form factor linux PCs with specialized/stripped down software for ease of management. Its all pretty standard stuff and just as with a PC file server or external hard drive enclosure, just about anything could go wrong. From bad disks, bad memory, bad network card, bad chipset, etc. Not to mention the fact that even the best product can have a few bad apples in the lot. For every complaint we hear on these forums, there may be 10s or 100s of happy customers out there. I guess what I'm trying to say is... if you like the feature set and support is willing to help you out, I'd probably give it a go.
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torch
New Member
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Post by torch on Oct 22, 2006 0:17:22 GMT 7
I have a great system (Athlon 2800+ on a ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with 1GB RAM running XP Pro SP2), but it only has PCI slots, no PCI-x, so my choices are limited in terms of SATA RAID controllers because I'd prefer not to sink money into an older PCI card (versus PCI-x) and I'd also prefer not to have to upgrade my entire system at this point. Suggestions welcome, on both the issue at hand as well as alternate solutions. Help help help helphelphelphelpppppp.... Thanks! Hold up Cyber, are you by chance using USB to transfer from your Asus to your Thecus? If so, I want to tell you that I have personally thrown away (2) Asus board because of failed USB controllers on those boards and I know of 3 other boards that have failed as well. Before I fugured out it was my piece of nuts Asus board, I went through 3 external USB drives that seemed to fail on large transfer. If not, then nevermind of course.
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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 22, 2006 0:37:35 GMT 7
No, but thanks for the comment. I'm using it as a NAS.
Configuration is:
Linksys Router connects via 100Mbps to Win2K laptop and Netgear Gigabit Switch
Netgear Gigabit Switch connects via Gigabit to WinXPProSP2 (ASUS motherboard) and N5200BR (WAN port).
By the way I do use USB all the time and have never had a problem with it. On average my ASUS-based system stays on about a month at a time between reboots -- it is rather stable.
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mig
New Member
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Post by mig on Oct 22, 2006 22:55:47 GMT 7
To me, this seems like some type of hardware failure. There are a lot of components involved in the file transfer, so, unfortunately, that makes it hard to troubleshoot the exact cause.
However, it is NOT unreasonable to expect your 5200 to work correctly 'out of the box'. I would exchange your 5200 as defective, and see if the problem persists on the new 5200. If it does persist, then, further troubleshooting would be necessary to determine if there is a design flaw in the 5200 (and other users are just not verifying their data) or some hardware problem with your existing components.
There is a file compare utility (http://www.scootersoftware.com/) I use to verify file transfers, which you might find useful. It cost $30, and has a free trial. Make sure you download the PixView plug-in, too. I use it to verify file transfers after downloading files from memory card to hard drive, as well as, after making backups to media CD/DVD. It's very simple to use.
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Post by cyberwolf42 on Oct 23, 2006 14:39:47 GMT 7
The new firmware (1.00.04.3) did NOT fix the corruption issue. I will post more details when I get a chance to. However, here's what I know right now: * Copying from any hard drive in the WinXP-SP2 Desktop system to NAS results in some corrupt files. Different files each time, but always some corrupt files. * Copying from any hard drive in the WinXP-SP2 Desktop system to any other hard drive in the same system works -- no corrupt data. * Copying a USB drive connected to the WinXP-SP2 Desktop system to the NAS results works -- no corrupt files. * Copying from any hard drive in the WinXP-SP2 system to shared folder on Win2K Laptop works -- no corrupt data. * Copying from WinXP-SP2 Laptop system to NAS works. Network Configuration: ================ Cablemodem | | [100mpbs] | SunRocket Gizmo VoIP Adapter | | [100mbps] | Linksys BEFW11S4 Router | |--[100mbps]---> Win2K Laptop | |--[100mbps]---> NetGear Gigabit Switch | |--[GigE]--> N5200BR WAN Port |--[GigE]--> WinXP-SP2 Desktop System |--[GigE]--> WinXP-SP2 Laptop System
WinXP-SP2 Desktop system is on Static IP and is connected via DLink Gigabit Ethernet Card to a NetGear Gigabit Switch which is connected to my Linksys Router via 100Mbps. WinXP-SP2 Laptop system is on DHCP connected via built-in gigabit ethernet to the netgear gigabit switch. DHCP Lease Time at Router is set to 24-hours. Win2K laptop system is on Static IP connected via built-in 100Mbps adapter connected to the Linksys Router. All cables are Cat5e.
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Post by N2100Owner on Oct 23, 2006 15:53:21 GMT 7
Did you try to copy the same set of files from "WinXP-SP2 Desktop System" to "WinXP-SP2 Laptop System" or from "WinXP-SP2 Desktop System" to "Win2K Laptop"? If these two operations can be done without file corruption, then we can almost be certain the problem is beyond your "NetGear Gigabit Switch". It can be one of the port in your switch, network cable, N5200, or one or more of the HDDs in the N5200.
Will the data corrupt happen when you copy in smaller batches? Say 5GB at a time.
Just my two cents.
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ltj
New Member
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Post by ltj on Oct 31, 2006 9:10:51 GMT 7
Have you tried to connect the N5200 directly to the WinXP-SP2 desktop system (without going through the netgear switch) and copy the files? Or put the network cable of your WinXP-SP2 laptop to the desktop then copy the files?
I was wondering if there's somthing wrong with the network switch, the cable, or some compatibility issue between these network devices...
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