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[jhenthorne]

The DLINK DNS 343 has to be the absolute worst product I have purchased in years.  Somehow the drives got out of sync and it has taken 11 days to "rebuild" the drives.  I.e.  my business has been down for 11 days.  Of course the wonderful "smart" software from DLink was trying to tell me that I had 2 drives fail at once.  Of course.......neither of the drives had anything wrong with them after testing.

Would have been nice to know it was going to take this long before Level 3 tech service had me click on "rebuild".

IMO...the product is not even suitable to store pictures of your worst enemies on!!!!!!!

JH

[JavaLawyer]

The DLINK DNS 343 has to be the absolute worst product I have purchased in years.  Somehow the drives got out of sync and it has taken 11 days to "rebuild" the drives.  I.e.  my business has been down for 11 days.  Of course the wonderful "smart" software from DLink was trying to tell me that I had 2 drives fail at once.  Of course.......neither of the drives had anything wrong with them after testing.

Would have been nice to know it was going to take this long before Level 3 tech service had me click on "rebuild".

IMO...the product is not even suitable to store pictures of your worst enemies on!!!!!!!

JH

The rebuild should be measured in hours, not days.

You should always maintain a separate physical of your data. RAID 5 is not a backup, but only provides redundancy in the event of a hardware failure. Due to the issues I've read about on these forums over the years, I've personally steered clear of RAID 5 on the DNS-343 and opted to use four standard volumes.

[jhenthorne]

Couldn't agree more that it should be counted in hours.  Just reporting the facts and trying to give others a heads up.  I only had 2T of data to rebuild thankfully.

To your comment regarding backup......of course I have a backup with all my data.......but I can't exactly restore my backup to my NAS while this thing is rebuilding.

Once again, I am not sure if this is the firmware (1.04) or what of the DLink343 but in any case....11days to rebuild is unacceptable.

[JavaLawyer]

Every now and then I see posts in this forum with rebuilds that hang for X days, some complete, others just hang infinitely. One issue I have with the DNS-343 is that the unit uses software RAID rather than a hardware-based controller, which I'm sure helps keep the price point low. Nonetheless, I've avoided using RAID 5 due to sporadic issues such as this one.

[jhenthorne]

Well.....11 days later the "rebuild" is finished and guess what?!?!?!  The system is still DEGRADED and inoperable.

It does appear that my data might be there as it is showing my RAID to be 47% full.

Any suggestions?  I tested all the drives and they passed Western Digital's indepth tests etc.   I currently have 3 - 1.5TB drives and the 4th slot is open.

[JavaLawyer]

Did you originally create your RAID 5 array with 3 HDDs or 4 HDDs?

[jhenthorne]

3

[JavaLawyer]

Are you using a fairly recent firmware version? Are your HDDs advanced format disks (i.e. 4K)?

My only advice at this point, short of something drastic, is to make sure you have current firmware installed as there were additions/modifications impacting the supported types of HDDs and RAID. The newer firmware added support for advanced format disks (AFD). Additionally, using advanced format disks (AFD) with RAID 5 with legacy firmware that didn't support AFD could cause issues.

[CanadianClub]

I am currently in the same situation as you.  The good news is that a firmware upgrade to 1.04 allowed me to gain visibility to my Volume1 which points to 4 X 2TB drives configured in RAID 5.  I am presently copying of all my data (this array is only partially used) to another DNS32 I have with 2 X 1TB drives in it.  I think the comment about staying away from RAID is wise.  It is complex and in my case reduces my user addressable space by approx 25%, which in my case is roughly 2TB out of the 8TB (roughcut).  Once all my data is backed up, I am going to consider the simpler alternative of establishing 4 separate volumes instead of 1 RAID 5 array.  My backup can be on the other DNS321 for my critical data.   

My recent post can be seen here
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=40429.0

Fingers Crossed CanadianClub in Pickering Ontario Canada

[JavaLawyer]

The 25% loss of usable space is the cost paid for redundancy. RAID 5 is an excellent means of ensuring data redundancy in the event of a hardware failure, but should always be used in concert with a separate physical backup. That said, RAID 5 on the DNS seems a bit problematic based on the experiences of some users in this forum.  My personal preference is to choose the simpler option, standard volumes. Less bells and whistles, but less that can go wrong.