Create basic volume on NAS542 fails....

Prasmus

Hi

I have 4 NAS542's with 2 to 4 HDD's. 3 of them have 10TB HDD's and the last one has 12TB HDD's. All are WD RED (not PRO) HDD's and are working fine.

Now bought 2 new WD RED 10TB but I can't get any of them to work. I insert one in the Disc4 position and select Create volume. The interface select Disc4 by it self and set the type to Basic as it always does (and all my volumes are created as Basic one by one) so it can see the HDD, the size and everything. When I say OK and Apply the new Disc4 show up in the list as Volume4 and with the Creating status. The led4 blinks nicely too. But after 10 sec or so the led turn off and the line with Volume4 in the list disappears. I guess the creations fails and then it's removed from til volume list.

Then I can select Create (again) and the same happens, it's shown as creating... and then it just disappears.

The S.M.A.R.T. says the HDD is fine but it dosen't show the S.M.A.R.T. info on the next tab, either because the HDD doesn't show it or because the HDD isn't a volume yet...

Any tips ?


#NAS_Mar_2020

Mijzelf

Fuzzy. Have you already looked at the kernel log after the create volume failed?

Login over ssh and execute dmesg

Mijzelf

Fuzzy. Have you already looked at the kernel log after the create volume failed?

Login over ssh and execute dmesg

Prasmus

Thanks for the reply!

Guess I have to read up on ssh, have only used the web GUI. I didn't think of / knew there was a kernel log that could be browsed. Of cause there are. Thanks for the tip, it might help me in the future!

Well, I tested the HDDs with WD own Data Lifeguard Diagnostic tool on a windows PC. They are both sick - what is the chance of that ?!?!?! Just my "luck"!

That said... it would have been nice if Zyxel had provided an error on the volume creation

Mijzelf

That said... it would have been nice if Zyxel had provided an error on the volume creation

Although I agree a nice error message is preferable, I can imagine it isn't there. There is only one way the volume creation can succeed, and a zillion ways to fail. Most of the ways to fail are very unlikely of course. Sometimes you can find strange lines in the kernel log giving a clue what happened, sometimes you have to read error messages which are written to stderr by some command involved by the creation.

So apart of a general 'something went wrong' message, you'll need artificial intelligence to generate a meaningful message, which is really hard to implement. A message based on the wrong kernel log lines is worse than no message at all.

Then 'something went wrong' remains, and that doesn't add anything. You already knew that. Yet the generation of that message adds extra code, with the chance on extra bugs. And how about a false positive? Everything succeeded, but because the kernel saw some strange network activity it spawned an unexpected logline, causing the error message to pop up, and leaving you in confusion. The box says something went wrong, yet there is a new volume. What to do now?