I was copying pictures to my network drive and I noticed that it was responding slowly. Taking a good ten seconds to draw a .jpg preview. I logged into my Iomega Storcenter ix2 and the dashboard told me the news: “A drive is missing from the device”
I immediately made a backup to my workstation. Once copied, I completely shutdown the Storcenter, opened it and checked the connections. In order to see that it was a drive that had failed and not the board, I swapped the SATA cables for the two drives, tightened it all up and turned it back on.
What I next learned was that I have little patience for blinking lights. “What are you doing NAS drive?” I asked. “You respond to a ping, but that’s it.” No web interface… Well, let’s see what’s really going on. Connect via SSH and run this command: cat /proc/mdstat You’ll get actual information about what’s going on. At first I saw that the drive was rebuilding and was at 32.4% with 109 minutes remaining. A few minutes later I ran the command and got something like 33.8% with 132 minutes remaining. Okay – time to get dinner and wait for this to finish.
When I returned, the missing drive was back online and was crisis averted? Nope. The next morning I checked my email and received this from sohostoarge:
The Iomega StorCenter device is degraded and data protection is at risk. A drive may have either failed or been removed from your Iomega StorCenter device. Visit the Dashboard on the management interface for details. To prevent possible data loss, this issue should be repaired as soon as possible.
Awesome. 😐 Well, at least my email script still works.
Later that afternoon I picked up a 500GB WD Caviar Green from BB for $56. The Green drives are quieter, a little slower, and use less power – great for this application. I took the ix2 apart AGAIN, and removed the barely 3 year old Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 out of the device. I know that people have hardware preferences out there, and I know they differ, but here’s mine: I don’t buy Seagate drives. Ever. I’ve been a computer tech for over ten years. (Of course I bought the ix2 without knowing it comes with 2 of them 🙂 )
After closing up the drive I powered the NAS up and watched the magic. The new drive rebuilt and I got a steady blue light on my ix2 when I checked later the next day. No linux commands, no format, no partition, no RAID – just replaced the dead drive with a new one of the same size and we’re back in business. Am I pissed that this drive failed in 3 years? Sure. Did the Iomega ix2 do its job and kept my data safe? Absolutely!
If I didn’t need this data immediately I might have experimented with bigger drives, but I think I’ll upgrade to the ix4 before I ever try to upgrade the capacity of this little guy.
I’m been trying to download and update the firmware on my iX2, but the tgz file from the Iomega site is corrupted. I sent a note about the problem to customer support and all I got was a link to the same download. The corrupted file still fails — not impressed with Iomega.
I’ll look at a fan graft for my device, but I just got a Synology 410 going and the Iomega NAS will just host files I can afford to lose.
Thanks for your posts on the iX2. There’s a real desert of information and I was happy to find this little oasis.
I found your posts on the ix2 quite helpful. There are no updates since 2010 – have you moved on to another device? Did the cooling mod work out well in the long term? I just took the front panel off mine, it the hope of eliminating freeze-ups when uploading files to the device. CPU temp is at 88C….
Hey Philip,
Just yesterday my ix2 froze up while trying to print. I could ping it, but no response to http or ssh. This occasionally happens and I had to do a hard reset. It came back up fine and reported no issues with the old Seagate drive and the newer WD Green that’s in there. This did however cause me to re-evaluate my NAS options. The fan has been fine, and my port re-write script still works great. It’s now about 3/4 of the way full. Which is not a big deal – it’s just that most desktop PC’s come with 250GB drives and 500GB of RAID 1 storage doesn’t seem like as much (sliding into 2013).
I set my office up with 2 1x-200’s (1TB) that connect over VPN and I was considering moving up to those. As it’s Christmas I looked for a sale… Well it seems the ix-200’s are discontinued?! The replacement is known as the ix2 (confused yet) or more specifically the ix2-dl. Check this article here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31762-iomega-storcenter-ix2-dl-network-storage-reviewed
If I do update – it’ll be a ix2-dl blank enclosure with 2 WD Red 2TB drives. Watch for a write up. – Kris
Hi Kris,
I have a similar situation like you.
The Iomega StorCenter device is degraded and data protection is at risk. A drive may have either failed or been removed from your Iomega StorCenter device. Visit the Dashboard on the management interface for details. To prevent possible data loss, this issue should be repaired as soon as possible
I cant connect via web so I am not sure what is going on.
I took the drives out and tried to to my pc by installing them in a usb case, but I cant read neither drives.
I will try to book up ix2 by swapping the drives next.
Please let me know if you have any other suggesiton ?
Thanks
“I took the drives out and tried to to my pc by installing them in a usb case, but I cant read neither drives.”
These are Linux formatted drives so your XP / Windows 7 / 8 machine is not going to see these native. You have a couple of options:
Option#1: Put the drives back in the ix2 and hope they start. It may take 10 min before the shares show up so you’re going to need to be patient. Once (IF) the shares show up – copy everything to your PC ASAP. The reason the web isn’t responding is becuase 80% of the little CPU is working on rebuilding the data on the broken drive.
Option #2: Make a “Live CD” and boot your PC up with Linux – Ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop (or better yet Mint http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php) and then try your “installed in a USB case” to see if you can see one of the drives once you’re booted up. Keep in mind your going to have to dig around to find your shares – I think they are under /mnt/soho_shares/ The GUI is pretty easy.
Good Luck!
I’m in a similar boat, I can not access my NAS via web or local. I only get the white blinking light. I’ve tried some resets, hard boot, pulling the drives out, but still blinking (for over a day now). I’m wondering if the Linux trick worked and allowed to read your data? I’ll be experimenting with it soon….just looking for some pointers.
Thanks!
Bummer – As these are SATA drives – you could pop one of them into your PC, connect and power up, and try booting from a Linux live CD.
This one might interest you. I have an ix2-dl with 2 WD Red 2TB drives. I was creating a purge/tidy up script that would organize daily/weekly backups by date and then purge when they were no longer needed. Apparently there was an error in my script and it targeted the filesystem on the storcenter. I caught it after it moved/purged /bin and /boot and carefully moved all the files back to their original locations with what commands were left in the memory (only had rsync and ‘double-tab’). Before rebooting it, I had full functionality — web/ssh/commands/shares. Now I cant access it or ping it. I thought it was a read only file system?? Got any ideas?
I have a feeling that it has a set of files that need to be on one of the drives. When you replaced with 2 WD HDD’s – Did you pop them both in and start the drive? That tells me that the firmware / flash writes to the drive and sets it up. I never experimented with this – but you could try:
Grabbing the data off the old drives if you still have them.
Starting it up with a clean formatted drive.
Pull one of your data drives (for safe keeping if you have data on it) and reset the device with the reset button.
I guess it’s possible that you deleted the contents of the flash memory.
What about using the “locate my NAS drive” program from Iomega and seeing if it even has networking?
Hi, I’m a happy ix4-200d owner who had his first disk failure this morning. When I woke up I got the email saying:
“The Iomega StorCenter device is degraded and data protection is at risk. A drive may have either failed or been removed from your Iomega StorCenter device. Visit the Dashboard on the management interface for details. To prevent possible data loss, this issue should be repaired as soon as possible.”
When I opened the web interface and dashboard it said “disk 4 not found” . So I decided to shutdown all running servers on the ESXi and disconnect all devices to prevent further risk. After that I opened up the device replaced the “Seagate 2TB Barracuda LP” with a “WD 2TB Caviar Green” and closed up the device. After that I booted up the device to start the rebuild procedure.
The little display says:
StorCenter ix4
|======= 95 % ===== |
The web interface hasn’t come back up since this morning, it’s been 12 hours now. When I connect through SSH and execute the same command as in the post above: cat /proc/mdstat . In the hope to see any progress. But instead I got this:
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdc1[2] sdb1[1]
2040128 blocks [4/3] [UUU_]
unused devices:
The NAS itself was configured to be RAID 5 with 4 disks. Now it says it got an “active raid 1” ….. Should I be worried? And if so, any advice for someone who has his lives-work on these disks …. I assumed a NAS would be a safe solution to keep my most precious data on?
I will give it until tomorrow evening before I really start panicking, but any advice or re-assurance from you guys would help me to have a good night sleep.
Thanks in advance!!
I am here like desperate. The IX2-DL crashed the HDD, just a fast blink Blue and White LEDs. Replaced the HDD with an almost new working formatted 500GB Maxtor HDD. Now blue LED is steady on, but white led blinks once a second. I wonder if there is some necessary file inside the HDD for the IX2 go ahead.
Pressing the reset button on the back doesn’t change anything. I tried all possible combinations, holding for 4, 5, 8, 20, 500 seconds, while power on, while power down, no changes.
I can have some LAN IP scan recognizes the “Iomega” on 192.168.5.119, but that is it. No port answer on that address, it means no http page from the unit, no answer from browser http://192.168.5.119.
If I turn power IX2 off, the ping on such IP doesn’t answer, so, it is the Iomega IX2 there. What can I do?
That unit cost me good money two years ago. What can I do to recuperate it? why IP ping answers and nothing else? I opened the device, no blotted capacitors, nothing broke or visible damaged. 5Vdc is okay. HDD is spinning, hence it got blue led steady on.
Help please.