2TB 520 with Amenisa

[jasgrider]

I have a 1.5 year old 2TB 520. It halfway loses its settings on power off and reboots. On the front screen it remembers its name and the static IP address that is setup for it, but when you go to the web admin page it wants to run initial setup again. You can hit cancel and get into the rest of the admin interface and it will show the static ip, the accounts that I have setup on the machine, and the volume on the RAID array just fine. It will not show any servers if you click on the link in the admin interface that shows know servers. It also does not remember its host name in the web interface.

You can log into the box from a remote machine via SMB and it will show the drive shares and all the information is there. In short it works "normally" unless you are an administrator and want to get into the web administration pages to change something. For example, I cannot enable FTP or turn on or off any other protocols.

I have updated the OS to the latest version (4.4.049 SP3). I also replaced the battery on the motherboard today but that has not fixed the problem. It started this 2 months or more after the last OS update to 4.4.049 SP2 that we put on last fall. I also attempted to reset the machine back to default settings but that did not work with the last OS update nor 4.4.049 SP3.

We could run in this configuration and have done so for a while but we want to start using this Snap to move our users home/my documents directories off of their local machines and onto something that is a lot easier and faster to backup. And this settings issue has me sketched out as far as trusting this device to handle our user's files.

Anybody have any ideas or am I going to be stuck calling Adaptec and praying they can fix the problem.

[blue68f100]

Adaptec will probably tell you to do a clean install of the OS. All of the settings you refer to are saved to the local drives and not in to flashram. Which leans to file corruption. If you have paid for support hound them, make them earn there money. Wiping it clean and doing a clean install should not be an option. They should know how to fix things without the inconvience doing a clean install. If not there tech support is useless. If that is there only solution I would eseclate it to someone who can. Manager or higher level if needed.

Who know they may thing its a hardware problem. If you have Maxtors (junk) drives in the unit, I would move to WD RE drives. In any case I would run SpinRite on all of the drives in maintance mode. I do this to all NEW HD and anually on all of my drives. This can eliminate most of the HD problems.

[jasgrider]

Weak sauce.

Is that a problem with the Guardian OS based units where the OS is stored on one of the drives when it really should be stored on something like a CF card and loaded into RAM? I mean if its good enough for a Cisco Router it should be robust enough to run a NAS device.

I'll call Adaptec, Friday and start hounding on them.

[blue68f100]

The Guardian OS is very good and polished, and resides on all shares. Unless you remove all the drives and use them for something else you should always have a drive that will get you into recovery mode.

Adaptec has been pushing their support ever since they bought Adaptec. But from what users have said it is very poor. Clients need to stand up to them and get what they have allready purchased.

My guess is that one config file is corrupted/missing. But may be correct on one of the drives.

What I don't like is they moved/locked out commands from the shell, and force you to use their cmd line utility. This is very restrictive and does not allow you to navigate around. Putting more control in their hands.

MAKE THEM (Adaptec) EARN THEIR MONEY.