WD ShareSpace 8TB Failure
Boy 'o boy! Am I in trouble for transfering TB's of my valuable data to WD ShareSpace!
I experienced the exact frustraction Woody3366 had when he originally started this thread. My 8TB ShareSpace is less than 2 months old. Earlier this month I started transfering all my data from all systems (I had since last 12 years) including all my music/movies/finance/projects - everything into this box and I was still in the process of data transfer mid-month, when this volume started failing. The huge mistakes I had made, besides bying a WD ShareSpace 8TB, were deleting my source files after moving data from each machine and deciding to put off backup until I finished transfering all data from all machines and removing some duplicate data and pictures (which was another 3-4 days away). For that I now feel as dumb as WD folks.
At first the drive manager started claiming random disks as 'unassigned' every time I rebooted - sometimes a disk or two even said 'not installed'. After 2-3 reboots, it consistently started saying Disk3 was 'good' but unassigned. Even though Raid 5 can be accessible in 'degraded' mode, I couldn't access any folder - the entire volume and all shares were unavailable.
I reported this to WD and had them send me a second ShareSpace (by holding $1850) just to ensure the enclosure is not the issue. When I moved all disks to the new enclosure I faced the same issue. Then I pulled the Disk3 and inserted a brand new 2TB disk - but the system maintained the same status, which was very confusing to me. They could have made the system identify a new drive and offer me the option to rebuild right there - but no, I had to figure out what to do next myself, which wasn't documented very well.
Eventually I had to click on the 'clean' icon to clean the third disk. Then the next reboot identified the new disk as 'new' and started rebuilding the array, which took about 40 hours. I was so happy that at least the array is being rebuilt and I can soon recover my data.
But my excitement was shortlived and such illfated I felt to find that the DataVolume wasn't accessible. Looking at the logs, right after the log that said "DataVolume works normally (resync 100% completed)", there was this log that said "DataVolume doesn't exist".
I think as Woody3366 believes, the recovery pretty much wiped all disks? That is outright stupid of WD. What kind of recovery process is that? I am pretty sure it came up with a clean slate after 40 hours - since now I see both 'remove' and 'clean' icons against each of 4 disks, meaning it thinks all 4 disks are used by unrelated to 'DataVolume'.
I think by trying to rebuild the array WD's way I entirely screwed up any chance I had of recovering my data. I have to now wait until Monday to talk to them again - but having talked to their support for a while, I have no hope of getting any meaningful support from them. As Woody3366 correctly pointed out, the support guys do sound primitive and in their learning phases. One guys I had talked to had put me on hold 5 times in 10 minutes to "... just check with his colleague..." for anything I asked of him.
Such a worst experience and loss of sleep - guys, please don't buy these ridiculous systems. I was trying to decide between readyNAS and ShareSpace and somehow fell for ShareSpace. As an unregistered user pointed out above, you often ignore generic feedback from consumers on the web and never hear about specific issues until you have one and google around regarding that issue. :-(
Raja.
