ReadyNAS running slow

Question

We have a NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ that we are using just for filestorage. While it appears to be running normally as a fileserver, the admin functions run incredibly slow.

Sometimes, backups take so long that they don't finish before the next run is due to start, and if I try to look at the backup logs or download the system logs, all I get is the busy "whirling wheel", until I get a "System is busy message".

Is this just the system being bolshy, or is it a sign of problems to come, and what can I do to diagnose them?

Extra Info

We are running in an X-RAID configuration, with 2 x 920GB hard discs with 590GB in use, and the system has 256MB of RAM.

Installed firmware is 4.1.5, with 4.1.7 being the current release version.

There are 3 shares - 137002MB (11:15 hours to backup), 197016MB (26:50 hours to backup), 276575MB (34:20 hours to backup), with the backup devive being a buffallo USB hard disc.

There are no obvious errors in the system logs that I have managed to download, though there have been a couple of mentions of no swap space free, and the error rate in SMART logs for one of the drives worries me a bit:

    SMART Information for Disk 1

    Model: MAXTOR STM31000340AS 
    Serial: 9QJ1JBK0 
    Firmware: MX15 

    SMART Attribute 

    Raw Read Error Rate 110008534 
    Spin Up Time 0 
    Start Stop Count 25 
    Reallocated Sector Count 0 
    Seek Error Rate 17251875213 
    Power On Hours 18164 
    Spin Retry Count 0 
    Power Cycle Count 25 
    Temperature Celsius 40 
    Hardware ECC Recovered 110008534 
    Current Pending Sector 0 
    Offline Uncorrectable 0 
    UDMA CRC Error Count 0 

I've used IE6, IE8 and Firefox 3.6 to access the server.

Answer 1

Had a rack mount ReadyNAS, I think it was an 1100 series. They use their own raid "X Raid" and pretty much it's a black box device. We had so many issues, and the forums were full of other users having similar problems, that we just pulled the drives and let it gather dust.

Problems with nfsd crashing, firmware updates that didn't work and the only rollback solution results in data loss. These devices are far from enterprise grade, I'd hesitate to even call them consumer grade. You'd be better off just building a machine loaded with disks and install FreeNAS on it... YMMV but my experience with NetGear and Buffalo's NAS devices has not been good.

Answer 2

The ReadyNAS is now working fine, with the following fixes:

1. The issue with not being able to view backup logs appears to have been caused by them not being cleared regularly. Also, I now use the "download all logs" option, which gives me everything in a zip file.

2. We were getting errors during the backup job. This was due to using a FAT32 formatted HD, when we had files over 4GB on the system (in one case 60GB!). Switching the HD to EXT3 allowed the backups to complete with no errors. Part of the problem was that backup logs appear to get truncated if there was an error during backup, thus hiding the cause of the error.

3. On the "System -> Perfomance" window, I enabled the "Enable fast USB disk writes" option, which cut backup times from several days to about 7 hours.