A few years back I purchased a 8tb sharespace nas. It has given years of faultless service. However, just lately I have noticed that accessing it is getting slower and slower. All four drive lights are flashing green even when no program should be writing to it. Whilst this is happening, discovery software cannot find the device on my network presumably because it times out from slow response.
If I turn it off and on again, it seems to sort itself out and acts normally for a day or less. I can write read files at normal speed (11mb/s). But then the whole thing starts over. Am I experiencing some sort of array rebuild? When I able to go into the web interface (just after a restart) the drives show as OK (green). But I cannot do that whilst the fault is occurring because the box won’t respond and the shares are unavailable.
Is there any diagnostic software out there that can interrogate the drives on my network in situ to point me at the problem/drive? Anything I have found does not see the NAS and only shows locally intalled drives (SATA/USB). Are there any logs I can check?
Or is it going to be a removal of individual drives for checking in a drive dock and or replacing them one at a time until the issue stops.
The best method to test the hard drives within a WD ShareSpace, is by taking them out and testing them one by one. During this process it’s best to leave your WD ShareSpace completely disconnected, and it’s extremely important to place the hard drives back to their original slots in order to prevent accidental data loss.Â
Finally manged to get into the web interface whilst the strange activity was occurring.
The logs show some errors on the CIFS tab which I don’t understand - but all other logs show nothing. The drive is currently still showing the flashing drive LED’s. All four are Green and the power light is solid green. Only other light lit is the network one which is occasionally flashing.
Is this symptomatic of a drive failure or something in the hardware/firmare in the enclosure? If a drive had failed it should show in the logs surely. Maybe the relevant drive lamp would be off or a different colour? All are green…
Does the drive do scheduled media walks to find bad sectors? Could this be the issue? Not a fault but scheduled maintenance? I cannot find anywhere in the web-interface to support this and no logs say there has been an error and the array is in rebuild. The status log shows as RAID5 status good…
Should I need to test drives, should I use the WD data lifeguard software? Is this compatible?
WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics is the recommended utility to test the drives. However, as noted before, they will need to be removed from your WD ShareSpace for testing.
If all 4 drives pass the test, then it would unfortunately mean the enclosure itself is the one not working properly, and you may need to contact WD for a replacement if under warranty.
