Weird message re HDD possibly failing

[Wossi]

I decided to boot up my Icy Box IB-NAS4220 to watch a tv show I have stored on there. After it faffed around for ages I managed to get it up and running. Or so I thought. Pulled up the NAS setup page and noticed that the health check had failed :( reading the details is basically says:

WARNING: May need -F samsung or -F samsung2 enabled; see manual for details.

Which after 1 hour of searching on the net and in the manual that came with it, I'm no further forward :(

Also:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

So is the hdd in there on it's way out? I'm currently trying to copy over the data (nearly 1TB) on what little room I have left on the pc's at home just in case.

It's a Samsung F1 1TB drive (HD103UJ) in there if that's any help.

EDIT: Finally found a forum for the ICY BOX devices and it appears that the IB-NAS4220 does not like Samsung drives :( the makers know of this and still haven't managed to fix it :( I might just pull the drive out and bin the ICY BOX, only it would be an utter waste of close to £100 :(

[Psymonkee]

If SMART says it's dieing then backup all essential data and replace ASAP!

Of course if it dies and is fairly new a warranty swap out with Samsung should be do-able....

[Mark]

Some enclosures have timing issues with the Samsungs. Icy Box aren't the only ones.

PS - this problem only happens with RAID enclosures like the Icy Box mentioned above. I'd be very surprised if a standard USB/FW/eSATA caddy was affected.

Can't remember if my Drobo is afflicted and I haven't put any of my Samsung drives in it to find out.

[Wossi]

Am currently backing up as much as I can but, I have to do it in batches as I don't have enough space in one place for everything, so having to save them all over.

Apparently the 4220 can't use Samsung or WD drives now :( Definitely gonna sling this when everything is backed up and find a different solution :(

http://en.nas-4220.org/index.php/Harddrives#Recommended_HDDs

[Del Lardo]

Can't remember if my Drobo is afflicted and I haven't put any of my Samsung drives in it to find out.


what are your thoughts on the Drobo? Was thinking of buying one but from what I can gather the performance isn't great and I would need the USB 2 Ethernet adaptor which brings the cost into Netgear ReadyNas territory

[Kainz]

EDIT: Finally found a forum for the ICY BOX devices and it appears that the IB-NAS4220 does not like Samsung drives :( the makers know of this and still haven't managed to fix it :( I might just pull the drive out and bin the ICY BOX, only it would be an utter waste of close to £100 :(
I bought that NAS back in August 2008 - it now sits in my junk cupboard used for only 3 days. The thing was awfully slow for me for transfer rates. I had the same Sammy drive, and a Seagate 1TB in there. I also checked their forums back then and the support seemed to be quite poor with no indication of any firmware upgrade that could have resolved the incompatibility. I wasted around £100 on that NAS :angry:

Iirc Samsung have a good warranty on those 1TB drives and mine 4x drives still run strong in external enclosures. I reckon they'll be fine if you hook it up to your pc mobo.

[Wossi]

I did find it weird that out of all the sammy drives in the pc's at home that this one would start to fail. It's just a pain backing the data up because, as you found out, the transfer rate is so damn slow.

EDIT: Kainz, is this what you have? http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4QTN&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=akasa+integral&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0 There's a few different types and finding one in stock is a pain.

[Kainz]

EDIT: Kainz, is this what you have? http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4QTN&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=akasa+integral&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0 There's a few different types and finding one in stock is a pain.
They are hard to get yep. Strange that it is a different colour. Having both eSATA and USB transfer interfaces is tremendously useful tbh, as USB is frankly crap for transfer speeds. I am just wondering why it is more expensive on dabs atm.

At the end of the day it supports IDE/SATA and has eSATA and USB interfaces and that is all ya need :)

[Wossi]

Just ordered a couple of enclosures and a spare hdd.

[Mark]

what are your thoughts on the Drobo? Was thinking of buying one but from what I can gather the performance isn't great and I would need the USB 2 Ethernet adaptor which brings the cost into Netgear ReadyNas territory

It isn't stellar for sure. 3-4x slower than eSATA maybe. Still faster than a lot of the cheap RAID/NAS boxen (like the Icy Box above).

I didn't bother with the DroboShare box - I have a Linux-based fileserver here anyway so just made a share on that. All I lose is the fancy Drobo Dashboard which I'm not particularly bothered about (there's a Linux version if I wanted it). The best thing to do with Drobo is just to set it up and leave it be - most of the bad reports on the net are down either to hardware failure (it happens, particularly with the PSU it seems), or assuming it's safe to just yank out cables.

[Burble]

What sort of throughput are you getting, Mark? I've outgrown my TeraStation Pro and was thinking about a Drobo but the whole USB2nes and lack of ethernet put me off a bit.

[Darryn]

Ive also got a icybox 4220 at the back of a cupboard as it didnt get along with my WD hhds and the transfer rate was piss-poor.

[Mark]

What sort of throughput are you getting, Mark? I've outgrown my TeraStation Pro and was thinking about a Drobo but the whole USB2nes and lack of ethernet put me off a bit.
Very far from scientific, but...

icebox ~ # hdparm -T -t /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 4542 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2271.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 48 MB in 3.05 seconds = 15.76 MB/sec

icebox ~ # dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=16384 count=16384
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 16.8993 s, 15.9 MB/s
PS - that's using Firewire 400. I don't expect USB would be that far different.

[Burble]

Ta :)

[Kainz]

I swear that Icybox HD incompatibilities list was smaller when I last looked at it mid-last year lol