WD Sharespace, the NAS you DO NOT want to rely on.

[Unregistered]

Sounds like WD BS to me

It didn't work, All I recovered were half of the files (even with the 4 drives) all named like numbers (123123.jpg and so on). I had much trouble to find the RAID config parameters, so I will post them here, that people can find them.

SHARESPACE 4TB RAID parameters

Raid Type : Raid 5
Disk Order : Make it the same as in your device (numbers are besides the disks)
Block Size : 512K
Block Order : Left Asynchronous

The WDC support people have contacted me, but so far without results. They said it was because I was running Windows 7, and the Sharespace is incompatible with that.
(As far as I know http is platform-independent, but I can be mistaken)
So I tried both with XP and Vista PC's, but without any luck. I'll keep you posted if any solution comes up.

I am having problems with the "not compatible with Windows 7" part of this. One of the basic reasons for using NAS is to distance from the clients. As long as you are using a compatible file system it shouldn't matter what OS the clients are running.

I suspect that WD support is giving you some of the grainy lube.

This thread tells me that I won't be getting this unit. Hope it works out for you.

 

[Unregistered]

Web Access

Hey there,

same problem on my side.
Can access all the files, can access via ftp,
even vie web to the twonkey on port 9000.
But i can not access the web access.
Unfortunately I reset the box and not ssh
is not available anymore.....

Anyboy found or learned a solution?

Thanks,

Christian

 

[Unregistered]

Solution....

Hey there,

still don´t know what exactly went wrong so that the http connection error
occurs but at least there is one way to solve the problem more or less:

If the system crashes or if you crash the system by playing with the linux
system just format the hard drives, all four of them and put them back into
the system. Restart and the system will start to build up itself from the flash
memory, works like a charm afterwards. Draw back is that it puts the system
back to RAID 5, takes 15-20 hours until its done.
Not really comfortable if you play around and end up crashing the system time
by time....

Cheers,

Christian

 

[Unregistered]

Other NAS suggestion

I know a lot of people are having problems with this product. My question is, which other product out there are you guys buying instead?

 

[Raja]

Alternative NAS to WD ShareSpace

I know a lot of people are having problems with this product. My question is, which other product out there are you guys buying instead?

I've recently bought a readyNAS - bought another 8TB HDD for that and is working great so far. Apparently readyNAS configures you with XRAID by default.

One lesson I learnt over the past year or so is to not buy HDD from online stores such as Amazon and TigerDirect - their packing sucks; apparently they (and most buyers too) don't realize that HDDs have couple of pretty fragile parts and the life of HDD can be drastically reduced by the time it reaches you. Amazon had shipped my 8TB ShareSpace within 2 additional boxes (on top of the WD's box for the unit itself); and due to lack of padding inside the 3rd and outermost box, the 2nd box within was rattling inside. I can only imagine what the unit might have gone though the 5 days of ground-shipping - everytime the trucker hit the break and accelerator, probably the unit kept hitting the walls of larger outer box :-(. These days I buy HDDs from local stores - they at least have good shipping till the store and manual handling of HDD by store employees is the only thing to worry about; but they are mostly professional in stores like Fry's and Best Buy.

So, my advice is to just buy the enclosure online - most of the time you get great deals online; and then buy the disks in a local store..... Just my thought....

 

[Unregistered]

WD support for 4tb NAS "my reply to WD who do not understand"

The issue is that the device does not have an S/N number on the back. It does have a SYS number which is apparently the serial number. What a shame that no-one at WD seems to get this. What a shame also that the unit was shipped and, when I rang, found out that the serial number is a known problem unit…BUT IT WAS STILL SHIPPED ANYWAY!!!! What is this ‘customer fault detection” as your current testing regime?

The continued suggestion that this is a MIOnet problem means that you simply do not understand your product or the problem or customers or customer service or quality assurance.

The help desk person then gave me a return number told me to return it to the retailer and “TELL THE SALEMAN TO GIVE YOU A NEW UNIT THAT WILL, NOT GO SO QUICK”. I was told that that was a good question. I am still wondering how I might manage that feat!

If this is WD’s idea of ‘service’ then I was sadly mistaken buying WD product. This will not happen again.

WD’s help and professionalism so far has been a disgraceful failure. Fortunately, in Australia, we have legislation called “Unfit for Purpose” which I am exercising to get a refund.

I use a rather cheaper ACER device at work (same specs + wireless) and it needs a reboot every 6 months, but apart from that faster and much more reliable.

RECOMMENDATION FOR WD! AVOID THIS COMPANY'S PRODICT AND "SERVICE"

 

[MarkPrimo]

My 2 Cents

My NAS went south too. Started out as authentication errors. Tried a reset, then it only showed the config folder, still would not authenticate or give access. Now it won't access at all. I am sending it back. Luckily, I was only using it as a backup device, but all my backup routines were on the drive, so now I will have to rebuild all that when I get the new drive.

 

[Unregistered]

Yet another Problem

Got my ShareSpace. Set it up: RAID 5. After 1 week, 2 drives suddenly reported bad. Goodbye data. Tech support was the worst I have ever experienced. I'm just going to send it back for a refund.

 

[handruin]

Given what I've read about the product reliability from a few people, I would first say that it sucks to hear you've had issues and in some case lost your data. However, like many things in life the strong lesson to take away from this is that no level of RAID is a form of backup even in the enterprise world. Please consider finding alternate means of backing up your large sets of data even if by crude means. I use alternate means such as Mozy and other offline backups to copy and replicate my most important data.

That's no excuse for WD and their poor reliability and usability of their product, but no matter how much you spend on a NAS or even build your own, there is always the chance a component can fail or worse you get some kind of virus or corruption and your data is toast.

 

[DepressedWDUser]

No OS on Device

So in response to briefly reading your woes. It is not true, the Linux kernal which controls the ShareSpace RAID is in fact apart of the RAID themselves. How do I know? Cuz in an attempt to recover my data, I too purchased another $600 (after tax) 4TB ShareSpace device. Funny thing, after replacing all the drives, same problem. The humor came when I discoverred that the "Good and New" drives I had put back in to my old unit, now worked. I'm currently using RAID recovery utility which I purchased for $90, plus a 2TB $99 recovery HD, to try and get my data back. I was told the hard drives in the ShareSpace were WD Black series. Not! They're Green, power management series. Once the data is recovered, I plan on building a FreeNAS device and cut my losses. At least with the FreeNAS, I'll be transferring at over 100Mb instead of the 24Mb I was getting when my Wester Digital NAS worked, for 3 months. Now I'm off in search for the never-to-be-seen WD RAID parameters and offsets. Wish me luck!

I just have e-mailed the WD support my last try to save all my data. I asked them if the NAS has the OS installed on the disks or on the device itself, and aparantly the OS is installed on the device itself. So I will ask my reseller if I can swap drives with another device and see if I can access my data that way. Saddly enough, this is my last chance at a full recovery I think. I will post the results as soon as I get them.

 

[Unregistered]

Hey there,

still don´t know what exactly went wrong so that the http connection error
occurs but at least there is one way to solve the problem more or less:

If the system crashes or if you crash the system by playing with the linux
system just format the hard drives, all four of them and put them back into
the system. Restart and the system will start to build up itself from the flash
memory, works like a charm afterwards. Draw back is that it puts the system
back to RAID 5, takes 15-20 hours until its done.
Not really comfortable if you play around and end up crashing the system time
by time....

Cheers,

Christian


Is it work? i'm newbiz......anybody can help?...

 

[Unregistered]

I got my data back with console in internal linux

I read a lot about problems in this forum, thanks for all info here. Perhaps this will help everybody who still can access over HTTP to the device, but the RAID no more provide shares.

In /tmp there is a file raid.log that show the last configuration. There I saw that /dev/md2 was used as RAID5 with sd[a-d]4 partitions. My confuguration show, that 2 drives are missed in configuration. You can check that with "cat /proc/mdstat", I got then as result: "md2: active raid5" and only 2 device.

A RAID5 only can start here with 3 devices. So I try to add use only 3 drives, and it works with following! "mdadm --assemble --force -v /dev/md2 /dev/sd[abc]4" -> /dev/md2 has been started with 3 drivers (out of 4).

After that I add the missing drive by "mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdd4 -> hot added /dev/sdd4. Now "cat /proc/mdstat" show that raid starts recovering the data to synch all drives. 0.0% (320768/975097920) finish=911.5min speed=17802K/sec.

After that it was needed to make logival volumes. See in previews posts how to use: pvscan, pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate. The lvcreate says me that not 714329 are able to use (some smaller value will printed in error message). So I simply use the value that is show and repeat lvcreate to define the volume.

fsck.ext3 shows some errors in system because volume is smaller now, journal and data are checked. I loose no data at all and I can now recover by myself (no additional cost). After that mount the new device and your data can be accessed successfully, finish!

Now after I store all data to an other external drive, I will reset to factory defaults the device if the next reboot shows me still no data (if internal linux is still not able to provide data from RAID5).

To prevent this I have also updated to last firmware for the WDShareSpace 4TB. This I will see after next 4 hours when the recovery is finish and a reboot is done.

I know that this info is not usable for people with zero linux experiences, but I hope that this info is useful for anybody that knows linux a little like me: give you a try to recover the data by yourself!, it's not possible to damage the filesystem if you use command that I write in this thread.

 

[Agradecido]

cesspools madstr

HELP!
Where can i find the latest firmware? Can I updadate from linux console?

Merci!

 

[Unregistered]

WD Sharespace built-in update FAIL.

HELP!
Where can i find the latest firmware? Can I updadate from linux console?

Merci!

Hi, hope you have not used the built-in update function yet!

If you have, you'll now be sitting with a slow AND crippled NAS, not just slow...

 

[adisor19]

I updated mine to the latest version and while i didn't brick it.. it's slow as hell now..

Seriously, this is absolutely the worst NAS ever.

Adi

Edit : after a NAS reboot, speed recovered somewhat to around 10 - 14 Mbps.. still nothing even remotely close to what the package advertised.

 

[Patrick E (B)]

Workaround for Windows 2008 domain (AD)

I've had my adventures with Sharespaces as well, 4TG and 8TB. Installed two at a client's site (mirrored using SyncBack - NEVER rely on a single drive!), and within months one of both already came down with a thrashed RAID5, was replaced under warranty, and if I remember well, the second one also had to be replaced very short afterwards. Now they have been running for about 2 years without a glitch.

Keeping in mind that it may be a non-stable product, that it has its flavour of Linux buried inside with quircks when connecting to Windows, and that you're on your own regarding support, I still find it a workable solution for cheap archival storage, provided that you keep them mirrored at any time, and never update the firmware (horror stories on this thread have kept me from updating firmware, wisely so I believe).

I have just successfully connected the pair of ShareSpaces to a new server running SBS 2011 (= Windows 2008 R2). Ok, logging on using AD domain credentials did not work, "Access denied etc."

The workaround is: take it out of AD.

How ? (this is for a totally open network environment in which all users have access to everything on the NAS)

1. Open the ShareSpace GUI, Advanced mode,

2. remove the domain settings and put it in a workgroup mode : Network > Workgroup, Mode: (o) Workgroup + Submit (you can enter any workgroup name, won't be needed in following steps)

3. create a user+password: Users > Users, click the + icon, fill in username and password, enable [v] CIFS and [v] FTP depending on how to plan to access it

4. allow public access on all shares: Users > Folder Share Permissions, click on the pencil icon next to each share, Public Access: [v] Enable + Submit

Now in Windows map a drive letter to the NAS:
- open a command prompt (start-run-cmd)
- enter this command:
net use \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\sharename (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the Sharespaces IP address, 'sharename' is an existing data share on the NAS).
- next you will be asked a username and then a password. Enter what you defined in step 3.

Done.

The only drawback in my situation is that Syncback gets access denied errors when copying from the NAS, and I have to have it use explicit network credentials (using the same username and password as defined in step 3 above).

Also, we are unable to delete directories from the Sharespace, only files.

 

[Patrick E (B)]

Sharespace security : under the hood

Upgraded a 4GB and 8TB ShareSpace from 2.1.3 / MioNet 4.3.1.12 14/05/2009 to firmware 2.3.01 with MioNet 4.3.1.12 01 Sep 2011.
No issues whatsoever, correct speed, correct accessibility.

The access problems I was having (unable to delete folders except through FTP) also has been solved.

Before the firmware upgrade, all folders on the drives (created when both drives were added to a Windows 2003 domain), showed security as follows from Windows explorer:
Everyone : special,
two unknown GUID's {S-xxx-xxxxx} : special.

The "special" came down to a combination of R/W rights I forgot to take note of, but it wasn't full control, because we got "Access denied" errors when deleting folders.

After the firmware upgrade, without having us modify any file of folder permissions on the NAS, all existing folders and files now show the following security when viewed from Windows explorer:
Everyone: special
10000 (Unix User\10000): special
jewab (Unix group\jewab): special
Drilling down on "special", it consists of all permissions, so effectively: full.

Apparently the two unknown GUID's showing as {S-xxx-xxxxxxxxx} before the firmware upgrade now are resolved to "10000" and "jewab".

At this moment, with nothing changed in the drives' network settings (ShareSpace still part of workgroup, not of domain, and Public access enabled) we again have full write and read permissions on everything from Windows.

I found this out by going into the Sharespace Unix/Linux.
With the new firmware you first need to enable SSH in the ShareSpace management GUI:
Advanced Mode - System - Advanced: ssh [x] Enable,
and than you can login using a freeware tool like putty with username "root" password "welc0me".

From there on go into the data space using the following commands:
cd /DataVolume
ls -l shows a.o. all defined Shares
cd <sharename>

From a sharename, ls -l is showing us or all folders and files in this share:
-rwxrwxr-x 10000 jewab.

If I interpret correctly, this would mean:
user 10000 has full access (as owner)
group jewab has full access (as group)
others have read and execute access

I'm guessing that the owner '10000' was the domain username within the ShareSpace under which it previously created all our user files and directories, when it was still under the old firmware and connected via AD to our Windows 2003 server.

Looking in /ect/groups and /etc/passwd, this username 10000 is not listed anymore, so probably got deleted when taking the ShareSpace out of the AD domain ?

The workgroup user account we now created on the ShareSpace and with which we now access them from our workstations is now the creator of all new files and folders.
Since this new user name is listed in the 'jewab' group, it apparently also can delete and modify files created by the previous AD user account '10000', because they belong to the same group, and the group has also rwx permissions.

So we have full permissions on all files and folders on the ShareSpace again, which is wat we were looking for.

 

[Master_RD]

Forget it

I have this NAS 2 years now (4 times 2 TB ) and the 3e HD failed right now.

In my opinion the used HD are garbage. The Green HD used are only good for slow PC's not for raid arrays. I have among other computers 2 Compaq proliant 1500 servers running 24/7 after 15 or more years with raid arrays and I only had a drive failed once. Rebuilding is time consuming on them too but it works.

It is time that the biggest HD supplier takes a lesson from this and supply all users with Black versions of the disks that they originally bought in their NAS and re-engineer the software to an acceptable level for all user
Otherwise a lot of people will not ever want to have WD disks / Hardware again.

RD

 

[stevech]

Not a good idea to buy a NAS from WD or Seagate or Netgear rather than QNAP, Synology, Thecus - who do one thing well