• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Terastation problems

R

Ronco

[H]ard|Gawd
2FA
Joined
Oct 6, 2005
Messages
1,308
I gave a friend of mine a Buffalo Terastation some time ago. I gave it to him as it was unstable on my gigabit network and as a result I couldn't use it, and also because it was noisy. He has got some very large files on there, some running into the 100Gb range but mostly 20Gb or so, all loaded onto the Terastation withput problems on his 100mbit network. When connected to his or my test network (a switch and a PC), it is possible to access the drive and copy more files on, including large files.

The problem is with getting the files off. Every time he tried to copy the large 10Gb+ files, it starts copying but after a while aborts with a "specified name cannot be found on the network" problem. It occurs regardless of whether the Terastation is accessed by the IP address or the name, and I've verified the problem occurs when I connected it to a switch and 1 PC to test this. Apparently Buffalo support wasn't too helpful.

Could anyone else shed light on this problem and any possible solutions? The Terastation has been set up as a RAID5 configuration.
 
Does it work with a file over 4GB but not 10 (for example, a DVD image at 4.3 GB)? A 2GB file? What filesystem is on that thing?

 
There's one file which is 4.33 GB (4,651,508,736) which has been successfully moved. The rest are all 10+Gb's.
 
I was having a similar problem some time ago, turns out the two computers were fighting over who was the browser master and disrupting the transfer as they fought. Only did it on larger files too, like a timeout after X traffic. I turned it off on one and no more problems. Try checking the event log for any errors then go from there, I can't remember off the top of my head what/where to reset it.
 
Then I'm really stumped. Try tracing the traffic with Ethereal. The problem probably occurs near the end, and traffic will cut off then, so it shouldn't be too hard to find it. You can also set up filters and coloring rules to see what's going on more clearly. That's all I can recommend.

 
timmy8994 said:
I was having a similar problem some time ago, turns out the two computers were fighting over who was the browser master and disrupting the transfer as they fought. Only did it on larger files too, like a timeout after X traffic. I turned it off on one and no more problems. Try checking the event log for any errors then go from there, I can't remember off the top of my head what/where to reset it.
Click to expand...

You know what guys, it's really weird. I was trying to help him out with some other stuff, RDP'd into a PC on his network and tried a copy... and all the ~10Gb files are now transferring.

The only thing he did was switch it off while it was being moved, and he moved to a different 100mb switch. I also fiddled about with the configuration tool earlier this afternoon and made sure it was working off DHCP, but that's all I could see as the web configurator seems to have dropped offline (Get a blank page on connecting to the Terastation via http).so I have no idea what the drive settings of the Terastation are anymore. (any pointers on how to get the http access back?)

So we're glad it's working, but I'm not sure what it was that we did to get it to work. It's probably going to take all night to transfer the numerous ~10Gb files via the network to the USB drive which is where he wants the files, so I'm logging off the PC for today and leaving it to see if it works. If that works then he can try the really big files.
 
Hi Ronco,

I have a few clients that actually use the very same Buffalo drives. We were having trouble with them too and found that there is a sleep function on it. That, and you have to make sure the time is set properly on the device. We had problems where it would go to sleep once a day and never quite figured it out until we found the setting. Try it out, if you don't know where it is, I can go and check one of the clients for you and let you know. Cheers.
 
Really? Intriguing. I kind of bought it in a whim, thought it might work better than a PC for the task (especially as I had a Dell NAS whirring away in the loft, that didn't work out either), didn't suit my needs, saw some negative feedback and found it didn't work on gigabit properly so I was kind of glad to see the back of it.

As I pointed out in my last post, I can't get into the darned thing except with the Terastation tool which only connects you to the Terastation, i.e. allows you to change IP addressing of the Terastation. I can't get the management console to come up. Anyone know how to resolve that? Thanks.
 
If you open the TsClient.exe and click on Browser Management and login as administrator, you should be able to do what you need to do.
 
It's rather odd. Didn't work yesterday, works today. Go figure. Wouldn't even give me a password prompt yesterday. He did switch it off again though this morning. How many reboots does this need to work properly I wonder?


All the ~10Gb files copied, the 100Gb file aborted at the 20Gb mark. However I can't discount other network issues at the moment including a dodgy switch. Still, getting the smaller files off is encouraging.
 
There is a limitation on the length of filenames. You are limited to less than 120 characters, including the path! This is a known issue and is apparently noted in the documentation.
Came across this in one of the product reviews out there.
 
I'm aware of the limitation and that's not the issue.
We've still not been able to copy the 100Gb files off, but there might be other network related issues with that too. More troubleshooting next week.

Generally speaking, what do people think of these? Is there a better, less 'gotcha-laden' solution which is as compact and as easy to use/deploy? Instead of sticking potentially more noise-contributing discs inside the PC's I have, I would love to be able to stick a couple of terabytes (using say three machines) out of the way in a cupboard using something thats speedy on a Gigabit LAN, reasonably quiet and is easy to configure. I had a Dell NAS in my attic for a short time and I could hear that thing in my bedroom at night. That, combined with my experience of the Terastation made me give up the idea of large network storage. But is there a better place to look?
 
Ronco said:
Is there a better, less 'gotcha-laden' solution which is as compact and as easy to use/deploy?
Click to expand...
Hmm. I see three things here. Better and less gotcha-laden (I'll call that "flexible"), as compact, and as easy to use/deploy. A Linux box with several disks in software raid and so forth is very flexible and potentially as compact, and if you know what you're doing it's easy to get going. But if you're not experienced with Linux, there's not much that you can do to get your cheap reliable fast convenient storage on. There's a hole in the market here, but I don't see anyone filling it any time soon; the Terastation is probably as close as we'll see any time soon. It's actually running Linux, but it doesn't expose the functionality it possesses in order to keep from confusing novice users.

My solution, and I think an ideal one, is a dual pentium 3 on a board with pci-x, a pci-x sata2 card, an Enermax power supply, and 300GB disks. There are reasons for each; I don't make much money so I have a lot of time to contemplate what to buy :p Dual p3 because it's cheap - I bought my original board and a pair of chips with heatsinks for a total of $105. Compare that to $380 for a dual Opteron board (no chips or heatsinks!) or at least $200 for a dual Xeon setup. Pci-X because of bus speed; 533 MB/s is far better than the 133 of standard pci, and pci express is too expensive so far. Then an sata2 card (the supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 of which I am so enamored) because I eventually want port multiplier support, and having 3gbps per port might actually make a difference in that case. I got an Enermax power supply because they're a good brand, and had a large single-rail supply (36A@12V). 300GB disks is my choice for the first 3 because they were a little more per GB than middle-of-the-road, but not too bad. By the time I buy the next 2, they'll be a little less than the middle, and I'll get the capacity I want/need for fairly cheap.

So why did I go into all of that? I am encouraging emulation. For $105 (board+procs) + $75 (2gb pc133) + $130 (PSU) + $170 (CM Stacker case) + $130 (sata card), a total of $610 I ended up with a machine that can hold up to 20 disks (add $200 for every 5 disks for a port multiplier and a 5-in-3 cage) and deal with all of them. So this is what I suggest. Buy the $610 worth of stuff, add $700 of disks and $200 of cage and PM, and for $1500 you've got 1.5TB (250gb disks->$100) of storage that you can expand as much as you need. Compare this to the Terastation's 1.6TB version at $1400 and it doesn't look so bad.

Having typed all of that up and then re-read it, I think a simpler answer comes to mind.

No, there isn't. :p :eek:

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top