TS3400 Speed Woes

[jrichards555]

Just in the last few months, I've noticed a HUGE decrease in access speed in our office TS3400.  It's setup as a RAID5 (as it has since day 1).  I thought possibly it could be a bug so when the latest firmware came out not too long ago, I tried that and it seemed to make no difference.  I've done a RAID scan and everything comes back as ok.  I even went as far as disconnecting it from the network, and connecting it directly to a laptop to test for the latency and I get the same issue...slow network access (saving or reading) - just pulling up a directory structure there's sometimes a long pause.  While there are a great number of files on there (probably a couple hundred thousand between all the shares), they're only occupying a little over 1TB of space.  A solid example - I transfer a 4GB ISO file - while directly connected or connected thru the network, I still get only (on average) 17Mbps throughput on a 1Gbps connection.  And again, this NEVER used to happen - it used to be pretty quick...

Just some background - this unit is about 2-3 years old, but never had issues with it.

[Texturtle]

I would suspect that you have one drive on the verge of failure. One way to test would be to shut it down and check one drive at a time connected to PC using Crystal Disk Info to pull all the SMART data from the drive.

[jrichards555]

I fired up Crystal Info (thanks for that by the way - very nice tool!!!)  - SMART seems to be fine on all 4 drives.  The only anomaly I saw was on drive 3, it showed up as having significantly less hours on it - the other drives all had just over 16,000 hours, this one drive only had about 14,500 on it.  That seems a bit odd considering it's a RAID 5 and all the data should be getting stripped across all 4 drives so all drives should be powered up and running equally?

[Texturtle]

It certainly seems odd, but I can't come up with a valid reason for it to show up that way unless that drive was replaced at some point in the past.

[jrichards555]

I purchased the unit new, and it's never left my side...

So any other suggestions on the slowness?  Should I just wipe it and start over to see if it's maybe a problem with the formatting of the array itself?  Even the web interface is painfully slow now...

[Eastmarch]

First things first, do you have a backup?

I have seen where drives that have not tripped SMART yet slowing a unit down, I still agree with Texturtle that a marginal drive is the most likely cause of issues.

I'd shut it down, pull the drive that shows fewer hours, and run it through some hard drive diags on a windows machine. Don't fire up the unit with the drive out. If one of those drives really is marginal and you pull the wrong one, if could fail when you are without a net.

[jrichards555]

I didn't hear back so I went ahead on my own and ran a backup, pulled the questionable drive, wiped it, then did a full format (not quick), wiped again, popped it back in and let the array rebuild.  I just got done testing and it appears to be back to normal - seeing 650-750Mbps throughput on the file transfer.  We'll see if it stays this way...if it happens again, I'll replace the drive.  Thanks all for the help!

[Eastmarch]

Awesome.