Asustor 6104T 4-bay NAS - Macrium on Win10 1903 can't see NAS and login to backup. Help? (Macrium 7 - #SOMUCHFAIL)

[VirtualLarry]

I searched, and found out how to do it, and I installed two new identical-model 10TB WD Red (white label) drives, into drive bays 3 and 4. I selected "Manage", "Raid", selected the RAID-5 option, then selected disk 3 and 4, both checked. I left it last night doing the RAID re-build/migration. This morning, it was 19% complete, but it's showing disk 4 as "inactive", and disks 1-3 as "synchronizing".

Is there a bug in the newest firmware, or did I do something wrong, or is there something peculiar with converting RAID-1 to RAID-5, that one has to do it, one additional new disk at a time? (IOW, when it has finished re-building the RAID with 3 disks, will it then automagically start re-building with four? Or does it default to a 3-drive RAID-5 with Hot Spare config, when you select four disks for RAID-5?)

I guess, I'm confused as to why not all four disks are listed as "synchronizing".

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, I discovered what happened. Strangeness. I selected "Manage", "RAID-5", and selected Disk 3 and 4, and I assumed that I was creating a four-disk RAID-5 array. Well, it seems that the Asustor had other plans, and created a 3-disk RAID-5 array with one "spare drive". I would have thought that manually choosing both disks to be included in the RAID-5, would have put them, well, into the RAID-5 array, and if I wanted to only add ONE of the two new disks, into the RAID-5, and then manually follow-up with assigning the fourth drive as a "spare drive", then I would have done just that.

Edit: I clicked on "Spare Drive", unchecked disk 4 (as I wanted to put it with the RAID-5 volume), but it just said "applying", and hung the UI. I refreshed the page, had to log in again, and under "Storage Manager", "Disks", it listed disk 4 as "failed" with a red X through the icon. Weird.

I did a SMART quick test, that passed, as well as a perusal of SMART values, no bad sectors, no errors that I could see. Doing a "bad block scan" now.

Edit: Disk passed both tests no problem, no bad sectors, still listed as "Failed". I've tried to restart and shut down, neither worked. I finally left it overnight, and had to force power-off. Great software, Asus, thanks.
And WTF is up with selecting to convert a 2-disk RAID-1 to a 4-disk RAID-5, and it FORCES you to have the fourth disk as s "Spare Disk", and won't do a 4x disk RAID-5? I wanted a 27TB RAID-5, not an 18TB RAID-5 with a hot spare. (No need for hot spare, this is a SOHO setting.)

And their new "Nimbustor 2 and 4" gets ADM 3.4 OS, but owners of prior NAS units are still on ADM 3.3? And Newegg doesn't even sell this model anymore, pretty darn short-lived, if you ask me. (Edit: And it was more-or-less newly-introduced at the time that I bought it.)

Software support, IMHO, is rather lacking from Asus, as compared to, say, QNAP. I've owned my QNAP NAS units (three of them) for far longer, and am quite a bit happier with them, EXCEPT, Asus gives you newer / more / better hardware for less cost. But it costs in terms of headache, because of their lesser (IMHO) software support. Then again, Asus is a relative new-comer to this field, but they really need to "step up their game", if they want to over-take the incumbents in this field. So I guess, pay less for Asus, comparatively, and get less too. (All IMHO.)

Edit: Don't get me wrong, it's very usable, for the most part, except for the occasional "can't shut down / reboot", and "had to restart the NAS, because my backups started mysteriously failing for no reason" (reboot fixed whatever issue). It is my highest-performing NAS, AFAICT, and cost same / less as my TS-451 QNAP unit.

And, I think, QNAP has no current equivalent to Asus's "MyArchive" disk feature.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, today, after I force powered-off, and then restarted yesterday, it showed "synchronizing" for the Volume, but it went faster, then when I initially converted the RAID-1 to RAID-5.

THIS TIME, when I clicked on "Spare Disk", Unchecked the Disk 4, and then clicked OK, it brought up another dialog, "Are you sure that you want to remove Spare Disk from Volume", and I clicked "Continue" or whatever the affirmative response was, and then it was spinning "applying", and then it came back, it didn't hang. I was then able to go under "Management", RAID", and select "Add Disk to Volume", select Disk 4, it showed the new Volume arrangement with all four disks, none showing under the "Spare" column, and I clicked OK.

Now the Volume status says "Merging", and not "Synchronizing". Which I guess is good?

Maybe the NAS ADM 3.3 firmware is just incapable of doing a RAID migration from 2-disk RAID-1 to 4-disk RAID-5 directly, and it has to convert to a 3-disk RAID-5 first, then Merge the fourth Disk into the Volume?

Seems convoluted to me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, more trouble afoot. AGAIN, my backups were failing, and I couldn't browse the share for my backups with Explorer.exe, even after logging in, the directory was unlocked, etc.

Reboot the NAS, and bang! It's working OK again. Looks like I have to reboot it regularly, to prevent my Macrium network backups from failing? Poor show, Asus, poor show.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, it may not be all Asus's fault after all.

I updated Macrium Reflect Free 64-bit a few days ago, and now it won't backup at all.

I've got a username, INALLCAPS on the NAS, with privileges.

I've added the username, INALLCAPS, to Windows' Credential Manager.

After rebooting the NAS, and logging out of the user and back in, I can now navigate to \\NASNAME\BACKUPDIR , and it loads.

Yet, Macrium Errors, says it cannot login, bad username or password.

In that error message, the username INALLCAPS, is shown - in lowercase. AFAIK, it's case-sensitive on the NAS itself.

In Typical Windows' fashion, either Windows, or the application, or the libraries that it is using, seem to RANDOMLY change an ALLCAPS name to all-lowercase. I actually had the name of the BACKUPDIR on the NAS in all-caps, and I had to change it on the NAS to all-lowercase, in order for Windows' to see it anymore, it had randomly decided that it wanted to lowercase the name.

So, WTF people? Windows is NOT case-sensitive, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't try to PRESERVE CASE, WHEN INTERFACING WITH SYSTEMS THAT *ARE* CASE-SENSITIVE.

Right now, I can't even get Macrium to "See" the backup dir on the NAS. I can login directly to the NAS with that username (INALLCAPS) and PW, and I can see the backup files.

I can open File Explorer, navigate to Network, type in \\NASNAME, browse to BACKUPDIR, and I can see the files.

But Macrium is just erroring. C'mon, guys, you can do better than that.

I can't re-name the INALLCAPS username on the NAS, I'd have to create a secondary in-all-lowercase version of that user, and give it the same PW and directory permissions.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, I'm pretty close to giving up.

Deleted the saved Credentials in Credential Manager.

I went back and editing the backup definition script. Chose NASNAME\\backupdir, It prompts for network Login, using standard Windows' Network Login dialog. I enter NASNAME\USERNAME (in ALLCAPS), and then the PW. I check off "Save Credentials". It doesn't pop back up, so, obviously, it was able to login.

Then ANOTHER network login dialog pops up, this time, same username, in lowercase (doesn't match NAS). I correct it, to ALLCAPS, and login AGAIN. Dialog doesn't pop up again.

I then "Run this script", agan AGAIN, another error, cannot login, and username is all-lowercase (WRONG GUYS).

This is Macrium 7 FAIL ALL OVER IT. Are they trying to tell me, that Macrium Reflect Free 7, as of the latest update a few days ago, CANNOT LOGIN TO A SAMBA NAS SHARE with an ALLCAPS username? It just can't?

Edit: Opened File Explorer, navigate to \\NASNAME\backupdir, BOOM, it has access, it's logged-in, or the credentials are saved. WTF can't Macrium access it?

Edit: Double-checked Credential Manager, yup, the USERNAME was saved CORRECTLY, in ALLCAPS. Why is Macrium lower-casing the username? Why are they modifying it AT ALL?

Edit: I guess, what with the recent update to Windows 10 1903, a recent ADM OS update for the NAS, and a recent Macrium 7 update, I'm not really sure which party is the culprit here.

It does seem, somehow, though, that even though I saved the proper credentials in Credential Manager, and can simply browse the share from File Explorer, that Macrium is still giving me trouble, and trying to access the share on the NAS using a lower-case username, even though I specified the username in ALLCAPS. Somebody's got to fix this. I may go back to my other NAS for backups, then. I never had this much trouble with my QNAP NAS units, they just simply worked.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I enabled logging, and I see "Samba, login failed" about five times, every time I try to run a backup.

For whatever reason, whether it's Windows 10 1903, Asustor NAS ADM 3.3.xxx, or Macrium Reflect Free 7, it won't log in.

Thinking that it was possible a case issue (backup username is ALLCAPS on NAS), I created a new share, all-lowercase, and a new user, all-lowercase.

Voila! I was able to start doing a backup again.

Now my problem is, it's only showing 270Mbit/sec on my 1GbE LAN send speed to NAS, and my HDD is reading at 30MB/sec, and my CPU load is 5-7%. (I am using some compression.)

Where is the bottle-neck? Is the "Free" version of Macrium throttled or single-threaded? I don't get it. When I did backups before, I was getting 500Mbit/sec over the LAN.

I did add two 10TB drives to the NAS, so now it's running in a 4-disk RAID-5 array, but surely, with that number of spindles, there shouldn't be any holdup. Or is there? (I think that I read that 6/8/10TB WD Red NAS drives were actually SMR nowadays. Maybe that's an issue too. But my Seagate 5TB drives in my other NAS are supposedly SMR as well, and I get decent speeds to that NAS.) Or perhaps it's the directory encryption that I'm using, on top of the SMR, that's limiting my write speed over my LAN to 200-270Mbit/sec? Regardless, I was planning on upgrading my LAN to 5GbE, but if my existing NAS units can barely push 200Mbit/sec for backups, upgrading to 5GbE would be fairly pointless.