iX2-DL cheap NAS, my adventure

[mikeford]

Starting this thread since many took advantage of the clearance on Tigerdirect to buy one for $49 incld shipping plus tax so we might be one of the larger communities running the latest firmware etc.

iX2-DL is a Lenovo Iomega NAS drive, support at https://lenovo-na-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/31121 and is marketed as a enterprise class device, but clearly its borderline. Its small, 2/3 of a shoebox, low power 6w spun down, 40w to spin up, 20w typical, and seems to support everything a small network needs.

NewEgg has a lot of reviews, average 4 star, reading them IMHO people who read the directions gave it 4 or 5 stars and had no issues, those that did not read the manual had some serious problems and gave it 1 star. Early drive failure is cited in several, and sounds a lot like the result of one of the do nots in the manual, failing to clean a drive formatted with MSdos partitions.

Other than general reasons, discovering I can't put in a drive with data on it prompted this thread. The manual at says all drives with data need to be cleaned prior to install, so I need to buy a second drive and install it first then transfer data to it, clean old drive and add that. I'm planning on JBOD not raid with two WD red 3TB.

More after I pick up the second drive tomorrow. All comments and experiences with the iX2 welcome.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Thanks for starting this thread. I linked to it in the Hot Deals thread. I'm expecting my NAS "any day now".

I have a QNAP TS-212E, which I plan on comparing this unit too. I still need to budget some drives for it, though. Any recommendations? Was thinking two Hitachi 4GB NAS 7200RPM drives, or two Toshiba 3TB 7200RPM retail-boxed drives. I have two Seagate 1TB 7200.14 (I think) drives in my QNAP.

 

[mikeford]

Mine arrived via USPS to the door combined with UPS I think from TD.

Two years ago I had a RAID 0 or 1, whatever a mirror is of two 2TB seagates is, and one morning the system booted "funny" two more reboots and both drives showed no files. No smart errors, just no files and not booting. I bought two more same drives and the $100 version of Seatools and eventually recovered most files, but not 100% of file structure. Both drives passed basic diagnostics and failed long diagnostic, Seagate RMAed but since then I use nothing but WD RED with the four 2TB Seagates as rotating backup and remove from system drives.

This NAS does something like 35MB/sec via 1000 ethernet, no point in a fast hot drive. Anything where you need low latency keep on a local SSD.

My previous four NAS all had issues from serious, ie good morning I have no data, to this funny noise from the drive can't be good.

Main reason for this NAS is that it looks to be a decent unit, metal Lenovo (although its the Iomega line), low power and hopefully will talk to all my laptops and devices with no issues which Windows was NOT doing.

Link to approved drive list. https://lenovo-na-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/30797/related/1

 

[VirtualLarry]

Link to approved drive list. https://lenovo-na-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/30797/related/1

Thanks. My 3TB Toshiba 7200RPM retail-boxed drives ARE supported.

Toshiba 3 TB Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB DT01ACA300

Edit: Speaking of 7200RPM drives, does the ix2 have a fan? I think my QNAP TS-212 does.

Firmware:
https://lenovo-na-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/31178/related/1

Edit: And why is this thread titled "ix2-DL". I thought that the -DL was a different unit. The one at TD was just labeled "ix2". Is it really the ix2-DL? Is there a significant difference between the two?

Edit: Received mine today, it has both Lenovo and iomega branding, and says ix2-DL on the box. I'm guessing that just stands for "drive less".

 

[JBT]

I just picked up one of these NAS's. Now I'm looking at "NAS" specific drives like the Seagate NAS, WD Reds, and HGST's NAS drives. I'm planning on just Mirroring these drives does really make that much of a difference to go to a NAS specific drive instead of a regular desktop drive? I understand they have added features for more reliable RAID configurations. But does RAID1 make use of them?

 

[Ranulf]

"I think my QNAP TS-212 does."

It does. Small one, a 50 or 60mm that isn't very quiet.

 

[mikeford]

NAS drives, short answer don't worry about it too much, but do pick an approved drive from the link above.
Small fan, I don't notice it, and plan to bury the server once both drives are in and working. Status reports fan at 818 rpm.
I stopped at MicroCenter and picked up a second OEM WD red 3TB for $124 incld tax. Read the manual some and checked online, this forum was down, ended up just popping the new drive in by itself.

Drive wasn't showing up or detecting from web page setup, so I downloaded the suggested software, in hindsight I think it was just formatting the drive and that put the server offline for a few minutes. Eventually it was just there with six shared network folders showing up on my PC I think due to the EMC software I downloaded. Update of the firmware was slow, as in minutes in a few stages, but otherwise without issue. Lesson, be patient while the drive is doing stuff.

Tossed on half a dozen movies, no issues, but I am waiting to be sure of how I need to move the 2+ TB I have on the first 3TB drive I bought a few weeks ago and then install that drive as the second drive. Planning on JABOD instead of raid, but may do the raid 1 mirror. Waiting on a firm answer from support on what happens when a second drive is added, but thinking pretty sure it and MAYBE the original installed drive may get cleaned.

Not looking forward to bouncing the 2TB I need to move around, even in a PC drive to drive it takes forever as in a day, and I don't have as much free storage space as I would need to keep the data in more than one place.

More tomorrow.

BTW the "Iomeganess" of this unit makes finding support on the Lenovo site less than obvious. HINT the Lenovo site defaults to the pro line with a home page that has a red tab showing that on the top left, the two black tabs to the right select something else and Iomega respectively. The Iomega support forum looked dead with a expired site cert.

 

[JBT]

Just picked up two 3TB WD Reds for $210. Should be here in a couple of days. I'm excited to try this out. I'll finally be able to move off the pair of 1.5TB WD Greens I've got in RAID1 currently. I've heard of a few horror story's about RAIDing Green drives, but so far I've got no issues. I'm just out of space!

 

[mikeford]

I finally got around to doing a chat with Lenovo support https://lenovo-na-en.custhelp.com/app/chat/chat_launch , the short version;

1) CYA back up first, but the following should work.

2) JBOD works with newest firmware, you get asked what you want to do first time it powers up with two drives, jbod vs raid 0 or 1.

3) When installed all drives need to be clean, no OS.

4) Data loaded on the first drive should be OK when a second drive is added later, at least in JBOD. Again this advised back up first.

 

[mikeford]

Questions I have remaining ...

I put the first WD Red 3tb in the NAS straight out of the static bag, did the NAS check it for being clean or clean it automatically, any way to make sure its OK short of doing it again?

It will be a time consuming PITA, but I see no way of getting around a full backup of 2.2 TB of data prior to cleaning and installing second drive that has that data on it now, and then moving 3 or 4 TB of data to the full 6TB available on the NAS once the second drive is installed. This could take like a week with a total volume of data getting close to 10TB due to moving more than once.

Permissions, users, groups, and devices, aka what I hate about using a Win7 system as a mediaPC and server. I'd like everybody in the house to be able to freely at least read media files, but it "sounds like" each device needs a user and password or can I give each person a user/pass and make a generic user for all misc devices?

Any idea how a NOOK or BD player work with these?

*** I have a LOT of old computers, all versions of DOS, some IBM PS/2, and Mac plus to Powermac era, OS6 I think to OS8 or 9. If needed though I could set up a middle aged box as a gateway with a FTP or something server.

 

[pontifex]

how do you get the media server to work?

maybe a better question is how the heck do i copy files to it? lol

if i try to map a network drive it says the network folder specified is currently mapped using a different user name and password. but there is no other mapping configured....

i decided to reboot my laptop and upon reboot, there was a mapped drive to every folder on the device.

 

[pontifex]

it works as a print server too

lots of features with this thing. don't know what half of them do, haha


i did get the media server to work.

 

[JBT]

Got mine up and running. Updated it to the latest firmware, and it started building a RAID1 array automatically with the WD REDs. Not sure if that's intentional or what. It's fine as that's what I had planned on doing, but I thought RAID1 being the default was a little odd.

 

[pontifex]

a 4tb disk should be here today. currently have a 1 tb disk in there now. will eventually replace the 1 tb with another 4tb and plan on doing raid 1. curious what will happen when i install the 4tb today?

ok, shut down the nas, installed the new hd in slot 2 and booted it back up.

shows both disks but only space from 1.

On the status on the left, it says Unused Drives: 1

under drive management there is a checkbox that says Add drives to storage system but if i click that it says it will delete existing data. i don't know if that means on the new drive or on both?

manual says - Check Add drives to storage system to add a newly installed drive. You will see this option only if there is at least one unused drive on the ix2.

but doesn't say if it deletes data on both or just 1.

gonna shut down, remove drive with data, power up and clean the new drive and then shut down add the 1st drive back and see what happens.

that didn't work...can't log into the nas, just says restarting and doesn't appear to be restarting, it's been booted for a few minutes and the red led is flashing.

shutting down and trying it with the new drive in the right-hand slot.


same result. putting drives back in original config and running the "Add drives to storage system" thing. if it wipes both drives i'll just have to copy everything back over again....

all my data is gone now...

so this makes me wonder what happens when i buy another 4 tb drive to do raid1 - is everything going to get wiped again?

originally it created it's own shares, now there are none.

 

[mikeford]

Same pain here.

I have a 3TB I added to a HTPC last month, bought the NAS and bought a second 3TB thinking migrate.

NYET, Lenovo support said it should work, but advised backing up first. I started the NAS with the single second 3TB, updated firmware to latest, and put 250GB of movies on it to test. Seemed fine, so I started investigating moving the first drive to the NAS with its 2TB of music files, and no go, clearly added drive needed to be clean. So today I bought a third 3TB, all WD RED same model, powered the NAS down and popped in the new drive.

Powers up fine, show 1 drive unused. I click on setting and check the box add a drive, and dialog comes up saying data will be lost, so I cancel and back up the 250GB of movies, this part is fine with just under 70MG/sec transfer rate back to my HTPC. All backed up I go back and select add drive again and this time confirm.

Whirl and click for about an hour "processing", then error message "Unable to retrieve the requested information." Google of that combined with Lenovo NAS results in LOTS of hits for a wide variety of issues. Nothing seems to apply, so I just repeat the add drive (protection set to NONE, not either of the raids) another hour same result.

I follow more of the Google hits, look at the error log, which shows all files deleted, which seems helpful so I do the add again, waiting now.

 

[mikeford]

Seems resolved, no clue as to actual problem but it has the feel of something silly and Beta should have fixed.

What I did, in the formerly hour long delay to the add a drive dialog using the protection setting of none (JBOD) that failed with the "Unable to retrieve the requested information." error I instead selected Raid 0 (mirror) and clicked confirm. Three freaking seconds later I was done, status display page returned as normal and it showed rebuilding array 0%.

Read some more about JBOD on the iX2-DL, and it sounds VERY poorly done with no certainty that a single drive failure won't make both drives inaccessible as opposed to only having file issues on the failed drive. Meh, I still want to run JBOD, so an hour or so later at 22% rebuilt I pressed the soft restart button and once restarted selected NONE in the protections menu, clicked the confirm, and to my surprise again no more than seconds of delay and the status window was back up showing the full 5.42TB of combined storage.

Restarted again, looked at a few things, noted before I had half a dozen default shared folders and this time none, made a few for ebooks, movies, and music, enabled permissions and I am copying 250GB of movies at 35MB/s right now. Note copying, not moving, this is a NAS for convenience in sharing, low power, but absolutely finally penetrated my thick skull, only data that is backed up or OK to lose. Minimum of 2 locations for all non simple to replace files, PC, NAS, offline backup drives, all three for anything important.

 

[mikeford]

all my data is gone now...

so this makes me wonder what happens when i buy another 4 tb drive to do raid1 - is everything going to get wiped again?

originally it created it's own shares, now there are none.

Maybe some case exists where you don't lose all data, I haven't found it yet. Rather than waste time in the future I plan to always backup, clean, install only pairs of drives.

 

[pontifex]

i guess i won't do anything with mine until i get the 2nd disk then...

so much for cheap NAS...

 

[mikeford]

Its not clear that more expensive behaves much better, but ONE page of clear information would have saved me a fair amount of time. OTOH maybe I would not have bought it, which is why maybe the docs are vague and poor.

Once all the pros and cons are known, I think I am still happy as long as it continues to work.

Temperature CPU 60°C/140°F Motherboard 47°C/116°F Fan seems always 800ish rpm, ambient in room is 70F. Drive temps are 35C and 37C, had to do a diagnostic dump to see it though, not sure if any easier way to read SMART.

To get to the diagnostic page IP "/manage/diagnostics.html"

 

[joe34]

I registered just to bring a few things to the attention of new ix2-dl owners.

First of all, I don't have a NAS but I'm thinking of getting the ix2-dl. I did a ton of research on this unit simply because it's the cheapest and I don't have a lot of money to spend.

Okay, on to the purpose of my visit.

High temperatures
Several users have complained about this NAS destroying their HDD's. Heat is one of the greatest enemies of a HDD and apparently this NAS cooks the HDD's. I've read where some people solved this problem by installing a bigger (80mm) fan. Obviously, this will void your warranty, but if your data is important you may want to consider doing this. While you are at it you may want to install a dust filter together with the fan. For the price of a dust filter it can save you some. What I have not found is a good write-up or video on how to do this, so if you do carry out this modification it would be nice if you could post a how-to for the benefit of other ix2 owners.

Remote Access
If you are thinking about remotely accessing to your ix2 from your mobile phone, think again! According to Lenovo...

As of February 6th, 2015, LenovoEMC Link has reached End-of-Life and will no longer be supported or maintained. LenovoEMC will remove the application from Google Play Store and Apple App Store on July 1st, 2015.

I have a sneaky suspicion the Personal Cloud too. Some users said they couldn't get this feature to work and that's why I have these suspicions. I am not so knowledgeable, but I suspect that while Lenovo is dumping the mobile apps they are also disabling the server which these apps use in order to access the ix2 over the internet. If that is true then you won't be able to remotely access your ix2 even if you used a laptop. I do wish Lenovo could be more forthright and could make a statement clarifying this issue rather than make users waste countless hours frustrating trying to configure this feature. At the same time I'm quite mindful that this is the same company who pre-installed Superfish on some of the computers which they manufactured, so I could be hoping for too much maybe.

Nevertheless, I understand that even without the Personal Cloud feature, there are other ways to connect to your ix2 over the internet. There's SFTP or WebDAV with SFTP, but the most secure way may be SSH. If you don't have a static external IP you would also have to sign up with a dynamic DNS service. If you sign up for a free account at NOIP you can get up to 3 free hostnames - more than enough for most people. Again, if there's someone savvy enough, perhaps they could do a write-up for the less techy ix2 owners.

I hope this would be useful for some people.

Cheers!

 

[VirtualLarry]

The side of the box mentions needing internet for activation of the NAS. Is it possible to simply configure it locally, without needing "cloud" activation, if you don't want to use any of their cloud services.

 

[joe34]

The side of the box mentions needing internet for activation of the NAS. Is it possible to simply configure it locally, without needing "cloud" activation, if you don't want to use any of their cloud services.

Have you tried looking up the ix2's IP from your router then browsing to it?