Quick: Why not to buy the iomega ix12-300r either!
In a previous blog post I explained that our iomega ix4-200r was a generally faulty product with little or no hope of ever making it into my good books, mainly because of the (deliberate) limitations on iSCSI LUN sizes.
After feeding this information back to the suppliers who recommended the product they gave a response which was something like “oh, yes, well, those are the small units, they’re not too good, try the larger unit instead: the ix12″.
And so we did, we bought a few ix12-300r units and configured them up appropriately, the good news is they don’t have a restriction on iSCSI LUNs that I’m bothered about – it might be set at 16TB but I’m okay with that. The bad news is, the product itself is just as unreliable and realistically can’t be used for anything sensible. We had a fault initially logged on the 13th October and as I write this on the 5th December it’s still not resolved fully.
We had devices in place for our backups as they offer really cheap storage, but actually that makes it much worse, because every time we had an issue with the device we lost all of our historical backup data, and no, it wasn’t the end of the world and yes we had copies, but it’s still really annoying to lose 14 days worth of incremental restore points just because of a hardware failure.
Here’s what happened with one of our ix12-300r units recently:
- 13th October: two disks in the ix12 stop responding and I log a call with support
- 14th October: I confirm that the disks really have stopped working
- 18th October: Replacement disks shipped
- 1st November: One of the replaced disks fails again, I contact iomega, again
- 4th November: They tell me they want to replace the midplane
- 10th November: They actually ship the midplane for replacement
- 14th November: Midplane arrives with no instructions on how to change, so I ask for some
- 15th November: I get the instructions, we do the change, now the device will not boot
- 18th November: After some to-ing and fro-ing they ship a new motherboard
- 22nd November: We replace the motherboard, it still won’t boot
- 30th November: They finally agree to ship a brand new unit, it arrives as a different model with 3TB disks in
- 30th November: The 3TB disks won’t work alongside the existing 2TB disks, we put all the old disks back in
- 1st December: After asking again I finally get a replacement disk for the one that broke originally on the 1st November
- 5th December: Drive 7 fails in the unit (a different disk)
Based on some more recommendations we’re trying out some Netgear ReadyNAS devices and I’ll post some updates as to how those compare shortly, but the fact that they come with a five year warranty (and cost a hell of a lot more) is actually very encouraging!