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about 2 months ago
What a disaster,
I wish I had looked here first. I’m an I.T. provider and I have used the Iomega desktop models on client sites for some time. I did a larger project and sold the ix4-200r 4TB model to my client for use as a backup destination and a location for the archived files. The backups were to be replicated offsite over the internet and the archived files were to be copied to an external USB drive for offsite storage. It seemed to be OK at first, but I encountered a problem copying files over from a Windows server. The shared storage became inaccessible as a result. Looking at the interface showed the same results as Coshe’s review… “Operation cannot be performed because of the status of the device.”. Nice… the storage was inaccessible. I rebooted the unit and also got the same result as Coshe – could no longer log on. Called support, did all of the same things Coshe did, no dice. One level 3 tech told me to try linuxquestions.org for help mounting the storage from a live linux distro. I was able to get to the data with systemrescuecd and the RAID volume was mountable. This begs the question – why does a free linux rescue cd (running from a usb stick – thanks to lilo) see my data but the Iomega interface cannot? Whatever the case, I recovered the data (much of which had not yet been archived elsewhere) and averted the disaster. Iomega acted as though this was an isolated incident and had me reset the device to factory defaults. I restored all of the data and the shares and life seemed back to normal. I then started getting complaints that some of the data was inaccessible (permission denied). I looked at the permissions from the Windows properties and some directories were getting different permissions than others (the user “root” was the only one with permission). Lovely… thankfully I had archived the files to USB a few days earlier then the directories were accessible. I also noticed that our backup software was having trouble reading from the device. Once again I contacted support and eventually arranged to RMA the unit and send the bad one back for in-depth analysis. I set up the new one, restored the data, and all appeared to be well once again. Not so fast… while moving data around on the shares I encountered corruption – files that would not move or delete. Attempting a deletion caused the unit to crash – same as before. Groundhog day! I’ve learned my lesson here. Support is treating me like an idiot and I’ve got a very expensive and very useless device to contend with. I’m going to replace it with something else at my cost (probably the Cisco NSS324) and move on. I’ll try my best to get my money back but that’s unlikely. I no longer have the original packaging and I bought it through distribution three months ago – far too long in nearly every case. Perhaps Iomega will buy me out of it. I might consider deleting this review.
Bottom line – I’ve lost all of my profits on a $40k project and I’ve spent countless hours trying to recover from this disaster. If that sounds like fun to you, go ahead and buy one for yourself. Otherwise run as far and as fast as you can from this device. It’s a complete failure and their support team is unable to do anything about it. It’s just poorly designed, conceived, and executed. This from EMC (who recently acquired Iomega). They should be ashamed enough to buy them back as they fail.
As I mentioned, I have many of their desktop units doing the same functions for other clients and also in my own noc. I’ve had few problems with those, it’s just the rack units that MUST be avoided at all cost.
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|about 2 months ago
Poor firmware caused total device failure,
I bought both this model and the ix4-200d (desktop) model to try to replace some aging storage on some old servers and for backup.
Physically, the device looks fine. I figure since it costs more than the desktop model and it meant for rack environments and not desktop environments that it is the more robust of the two devices.
Anyways, I configure the desktop one as an iSCSI provider for our Windows 2008 server. I use the ix4-200r to provide iSCSI to replace some of our aging server disks. Some of these server hard drives shipped with the servers several years ago and were making me nervous.
The device was easy to use and worked seemlessly with our iSCSI clients.
However, maybe 1 month after switching some of our server storage to use the ix4-200r, I abruptly saw some Windows event logs about corrupted storage and to run check disk. The StorCenter was configured to send emails, etc if anything was fishy. When I logged in to diagnose it, the volume showed up in Windows Disk Management as uninitialized. This was bad, but possibly Window’s fault.
I gracefully took both the StorCenter and the Windows server down. Windows could no longer see or connect to the device using iSCSI. The web UI of the device still worked, but it had no volumes. That’s right. All volumes were gone. The device reported that everything (hardware wise) looked peachy through the web UI and the little status lights on the device itself.
When I try to do any action in the device it says “Operation cannot be performed because of the status of the device.” That includes look at logs, look for volumes, create volumes, etc. All of my data is gone and the web UI reports that everything is good unless I want to do something.
This is sort of a disaster and it’s midnight, so I bite the bullet and simultaneously start a restore from backup (from the desktop ix4-200d) and call Iomega for support. It’s off-hours, so it costs me $50.00 to talk to somebody. The tech had never seen anything like this before and said it shouldn’t have happened. Walked me through the following steps.
1) Restart the device
2) See if your volumes show up. They don’t. They should. Did you create any volumes?
3) Try to see the status of the disks. They’re good. Your storage is fine. Try to add a new volume. Oh, yeah, you can’t do anything because of the “state of the device”
4) Remove disk 4 from the array. Oh good, the device noticed. Plus in another disk. Let it rebuild. After rebuild, same situation.
5) Hook it up to a monitor/keyboard (only available on the rack edition luckily) – do a non-data destroying “reset.” Now, configure your basic settings (time/devicename/admin password.) Press next. “Cannot set language because of state of device”
Now the device is perpetually stuck in this loop. They called it a setup-loop. My incident was promoted to level 3. The tech at this point has another idea about how to get the device back, but it’ll destroy the data. I just left it alone at this point because I wasn’t ready to take that step (especially since my restore is going on in the background off a device that is very similar from the same company.)
Long story short, I had to spend all night watching a restore from an ix4-200d because an ix4-200r failed. The +1000$ ix4-200r is in this broken/setup loop. I don’t trust the ix4-200d with backup anymore.
My Analysis
- They have poor, buggy firmware. This was shown by the awful software bug where all volumes started failing and finally disapeered for no reason with no logging, warning. They once broken, nothing was possible because “the state of the device”. Not even logging. Then, we’re in a setup loop (the techs had seen this before, but it’s just a matter of software to be able to robustly set a language or timezone without looping)
- The support is ok, they just can’t do much for you with their bad software.
- The device is locked down. Some state is in firmware. Other state is on the drives (so no, you can’t add your own drives and start with a fresh array.)
I restored ok but we still lost around 1 day or work. I don’t use either device from Iomega anymore (not even for backup). I got a QNAS device 6 slots with Atom chip. It came with no storage but I liked the idea that the firmware to run the device is not on the hard drives.) Anyways, that thing runs awesome and it appears to have much more sophisticated, polished firmware. I’d highly recommend QNAS over these Iomega devices.
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