Having a bit of an alarming issue with my DX4000. I manage a small company and the unit houses all of our company data files as well as a fair amount of other data. (About 2TB in total)
This morning I came in to the office and found that the DX4000 was completely inaccessable to every computer on the network. After investigating I found the unit was completely locked up, I couldn’t even scroll through the front panel. I went ahead and did a hard reboot as there was no other choice and the thing started back up… very slowly (about 2x longer than normal).
The system is currently up and running, however it is running extremely slowly, trying to log into the dashboard hsa now taken me 45 minutes and I’m still not in yet. The files are accessable, however it takes a good minute or so to open even a small image file (~0.5MB).
What’s more if I scroll through the front panel, it shows “Disk Drives: 0” and “Available Capacity: 0.00B”). Now I know that’s not 100% true since I can see/access the files however it’s definitely not normal. I’m a little edgy about what’s going on with it as it’s an important part of our daily operations.
Does anybody know what’s going on with the thing and is it fixable or do I really have to download a 10+ GB file and try to restore this? (and, if so, do I really have to use a USB 2.0 drive still?)
Working on doing so right now, I’m planning on restarting it and seeing if it wasn’t just a fluke deal when it’s done. I assume logging into the windows portion through RDC and running a chkdsk and sfc won’t screw anything over in terms of WDC’s proprietary services and such?
Just checked the date/time and it was set back to 4/15/15. Curiously enough, I got into the event logs and found that something must have happened around 5/11 that caused an issue (last log entries were related to windows update service(s)) and reset the date to 4/15. The logs then continued chronologically (4/15-4/20) until this morning when the system froze (apparently after some windows update services started/stopped) at which point it again reset to 4/15 and started over.
I don’t remember anything odd happening on 5/11. I don’t even remember getting an email notifacation about an unexpected restart or network loss.
I’ve reset the date back to 5/19 and am checking up on Windows Update (Windows Modules Installer was the last log entry on both occasions if anybody wants to know).
A buddy of mine and I both have boxes where the date goes bonkers on reboot. WD has not replied to numerous asks about this. Mine actually got better for about a year, then started again. I am not sure if this is why your box is slow though. I really think you may have a disk issue.
You just need to check the date whenever you reboot. Connect Computer wizard will fail if the date is off.
I can confirm at least one of the two DX4000 units we bought, had clock issues after rebooting without any apparent logic reason. I thought I did something wrong but I understand instead this is another issue of this NAS. For sure in my case this had nothing to do with HD problems, I was simply rebooting following a windows update
I confirm the RAID rebuild can last a couple of days if not more. And I also confirm, as I started performing some speed tests in different conditions, that the unit becomes deadfully slow (also the access either with dasboard or remote connection - which I would strongly encourage to use to see what is happening) during RAID rebuild, even worse if in the meanwhile other windows 2008 operations are ongoing. This is of course due to the questionable (to say the least) DX4000 design which has the operating system on the same disks with the shared folders.
As I made a huge experience trying desparately all sorts of WD disks on the units (you can check my old posts to see all the story) I made also several full recovers. This is for sure the best option if, after some days, everything looks stuck. The process however is deadly slow. You have to create the server recovery virtual DVD, then you select recover, create the recover boot on a USB2 key with at least 16 Gb. You have to follow the very concise instructions reported in the admin manual but do not forget that at some point after having booted from the USB key (few minutes) you need to restart the recover software on the PC to continue with the OS install, otherwise you stay forever waiting. This is not cleraly reported in the admin manual. At that point you can decide to create the OS keeping the old data and I confirm in my case it worked, i.e. all the data was kept (unless of course you have hard drive issues).
All the recover process in my case took 2 days, and most of the time you do not have access to the disks. But it works…
Okay, not much new to report as of yet as data is finishing up transferring. Windows Update only had one update that failed and that was a Windows Defender Definition update that I took care of. Thing is still running dreadfully slow.
I have noticed however that the blue power LED is flashing on the front panel. According to the manual that’s supposed to mean the unit is booting up? It’s fully accessable as it stands but the light is still flashing (maybe why it shows 0 drives and 0 capacity?). Both HDD lights for bays 1 and 2 are on solid however. They don’t blink at all which seems to indicate to me that something is eating up the HDD bandwidth possibly.
As far as I can say from my experience, you can try to switch off the server from remote connection, then switch it on again without loosing data or wasting time for the rebuild process. The rebuild (if this is your case!) should restart from the % when the DX4000 was switched off. Of course I would suggest to copy all the data before performing other tests unless you need months to create a backup.
