D-Link Forums
The Graveyard - Products No Longer Supported => D-Link Storage => DNS-321 => Topic started by: Phils on February 01, 2010, 09:29:46 AM
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I have looked through pages and pages of threads and have not seen this issue posted before. When I first set up the DNS-321, I had probably 100 GB of files to copy to it. What I have found is that if I try to copy more than 2 to 3 GB to the DNS-321 at a time my computer locks up leading me to have to reset the computer to et running again. If I break it up into 2 to 3 GB at a time, I can usually get through it although when I tried to move about 1GB of photos it locked up so often I really had to break it down into much smaller pieces..
I have a friend who bought his unit at the same time as I did and he also is experiencing BSOD's.
My computer is kind of old (Win XP 1 GB RAM with a 10/100 NIC) so I expect it to be slow. My router is a GB Trendnet seems to rock solid. I have the DNS-321 connection speed set to automatic. I'm not using jumbo frames and I have the AV Server turned on.
My friend has a newer computer with 3 GB of RAM, a 1GB NIC, Vista, and the servers are turned off.
One of my lockups was so severe that it actually caused a checksum error in the CMOS of my computer that I had to fix before it would boot up. I also noticed that some of the lockups coincided with Outlook checking my POP mail which it does every 5 minutes. This never happens when my DNS-321 is turned off.
Any idea what might be going on?
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I copied 800gig of data to the DNS-321 in one shot, and there was no lockups. I grant you, it took almost a full day, but there were no issues.
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That's impressive.
I wish I could say the same.
I have about 7,000 songs to copy over and I'm not looking forward to it.
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If you're getting blue screens, I really doubt this is a DNS-321 issue.
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I'm sorry Phils, but I have to agree with GRJ, this does not resemble any issue I have seen a 321 produce with an o/s. I regularly move about 1.1-1.2 TBs of data to and from my 321 and have never had it lock the o/s. As a start point, I would suggest that you go through you PC thoroughly and see what underlying conditions it might be having that could cause this to happen and then repair that first. You could start with a very thorough defrag of your drive. You may have a badly fragged drive and you may also be low on swap file space, it might be set to low. You could also have a corrupt file that your o/s can't deal with when it comes to moving it, so it crashes. Another place to look would be for a faulty memory module that may be giving XP problems when it goes to cache the files. And, it could be your 10/100 NIC card, it may be throwing to may collisions for XP to think the transfers are going reliably All of those things could be causing XP to crash. Also, one other thing, do you actually have enough free space on the 321 to store the data you intend to move? You said you had several thousand songs, but what does that translate to in megs/gigs, are your drives in the 321 big enough or have enough free space to handle that amount of data being moved to them?
Once you have checked out the basics, then report back and let us know your findings. Possibly then someone here can give you more steps to try. But really and truthfully, I cannot recollect any time that I have ever seen a 321 cause XP or any other flavor of Windows to crash.
Good luck with your hunting.
Sincerely yours,
Ryder
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My PC is old but well maintained although anything is possible. I do have a lot of hardware plugged into USB ports and occasionally they don't get recognized but plugging the device into another port usually solves that.
My drives are defragged so that's not the problem. My swap file is on a drive with lots of space although it's limited to 1.535 GB which should be fine for 1 GB of RAM. I could change that setting to let Windows manage it.
Somehow I doubt memory is the issue as I said, I only get these freezes when copying a lot of data at a time. The NIC might make sense so I'd like some suggestions about how to test whether that's happening. As for having space on the 321, I have more than 1.2 TB free space at the moment.
As for the songs I'd like to transfer, it's about 35GB.
The other reason why I posted in the first place is that my buddy with a much more up-to-date system is also getting BSODs with his 321 that he bought at the same time as I did. One thing I will test is to try to copy those files using another computer. The songs are stored 2X (for backup purposes) on a Firewire drive and a USB drive. I'll plug the USB drive into the other machine and see what happens.
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You might try a memory test like memtest86+ for a few hours on that machine. I had a machine with a bad memory module, and about once a week it would lock up. Took me a while to run it down, when I finally ran the memory test, it would fail on about every third test pass. It's been rock solid since the module was replaced.
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Just a quick update.
I started copying my 7,000 songs last night. I used ever-increasing increments and eventually it crashed. In fact it crashed my PC 3 times to be more accurate. My last crash led to a BSOD that cryptically mentioned a driver problem.
I discussed this with my buddy who also had experienced crashes in the past. He told me that he had solved his problem by uninstalling the driver that had been installed in his system when he first setup the unit. I'll look there when I get home this evening.
I'm thinking however that may be something to the memory issue suggestions but I'm not going to have the opportunity to do anything about debugging it properly for the next 10 days as I'll be heading out of town.
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I've said this before, and I'll say it again. There is no driver that is required to use this NAS. I've run many different models of NAS units, including the DNS-321 and DNS-323 that I currently have, and I've never loaded a driver.
If a driver is crashing, you can remove it. :)
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I never loaded a driver either but that's the message my BSOD displayed. There wasn't enough info to determine which driver though. My buddy's thought was that it was actually the UPnP driver and that I should check the device manager and if I find a device, I should dlete it and let my system find it again.
I plan to check it out when I get home this evening. I also am going to force the connection to 100 from automatic to see if that helps at all. My problem is finding the time to do all these things.
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The BSOD tells me you have a system issue, not a problem with the NAS.
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Since I seem to be the onlyone with this problem, I tend to agree.
The problem is it only manifests itself when I'm copying to the NAS.
I didn't know about it before.
If a tree falls in the forest....
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Have you tried doing similar sized copies to other network machines?
Since the networking components don't know what they're talking to, and don't really care, I still don't see how this is a NAS problem.
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Until the NAS, all the time without a hiccup. I've copied as much as 25 GB from my desktop to my laptop over my network. I have never had a problem that I can remember.
Also, I have never had a problem copying from the NAS to my computer although the NAS is still new and there haven't been many opportunities to do so.
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I'm at a loss. I can't really think of a scenario where the NAS could cause a blue screen...
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I've been at this a long time and neither can I.
It may take some time but eventually (with the help of the folks here) it will get fixed.
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How about a test from another machine with a large copy to the NAS? That should tell you something if it does or doesn't crash.
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You know what. I just got home. I'm going to try that now.
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You know what. I just got home. I'm going to try that now.
OK. I just finished a 15 minute copy without incident from my netbook although I'm linking to a shared drive on my desktop which has been giving me problems. I am now following up with a copy that will take almost 2 hours. Based on the way it's going so far it looks like it will happen with incident.
It looks like memtest86+ will be the next step after I'm done with this.
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I'd probably just fire it up before you go to bed and check the results the next morning.
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According to my dialog box, I have 20 minutes to go and I'll be done. It's been going for over an hour with no hint of a problem. As far as I'm concerned, the problem is the desktop pc or something between the 2. That's where my attention has to shift next.
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FYI, in case you don't have the latest memory test, it was updated recently.
http://www.memtest.org/
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The copy completed just fine. Absolutely no problem from my netbook. 35 GB went very well.
My desktop issue will be for Thursday evening.
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I have to believe this is something on the specific computer and not the DNS-321. It could be something as zany as the NIC not able to handle a steady diet of bits, I've actually seen one that would work until you did a sustained transfer. It didn't bluescreen, but it did stop transferring data and pop up an error.
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I have to believe this is something on the specific computer and not the DNS-321. It could be something as zany as the NIC not able to handle a steady diet of bits, I've actually seen one that would work until you did a sustained transfer. It didn't bluescreen, but it did stop transferring data and pop up an error.
I just wanted to say that my problem still exists although now that I've done my initial copy the issue is less urgent.
I did run memtest on my pc and after more than 2 hours and 4 standard test passes it did not find any errors. The fact is that on that PC a massive copy to a local, usb, or firewire hard drive doesn't crash like when I transfer the DNS-321. That leads me to conclude that the problemis with the NIC. Someone told me that although my NIC is 10/100, connecting it to a Gb router can be problematic if I use a Cat 5 cable. I've now replaced the cable with a CAT5e so I'll see how that goes.
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Well, I'd be TRULY amazed if this is a cable issue. A bad cable doesn't cause the computer to crash! I'd suspect the NIC or it's drivers.
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I never loaded a driver either but that's the message my BSOD displayed. There wasn't enough info to determine which driver though. My buddy's thought was that it was actually the UPnP driver and that I should check the device manager and if I find a device, I should delete it and let my system find it again.
I seem to have fixed my problem and the above post was not far from what the actual problem was. What I noticed was that my HP Laserjet All-In-One's buttons weren't working. How did I fix it? I unplugged the USB cable and left the printer connected by ethernet cable. When I plugged the USB cable back in, the buttons would freeze again. When I turned off the AV Upnp server in the DNS-321, the buttons would work. There is obviously a problem with the Upnp driver with those 2 devices connected. I don't know if the problem is the D-Link or the HP but they really don't seem to like each other.
So what I have done is leave the printer only connected by ethernet. I just did an Acronis disk image with a file size of 22.0 GB and it worked perfectly for the first time in 3 months.
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So, it's drivers, we just don't know which ones? :)
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So, it's drivers, we just don't know which ones? :)
It seems to me that the Windows Upnp driver that USB depends on must be the same driver or at least a close cousin of the Upnp on the NAS's AV server. It has to be the Upnp driver. My PC is more than 5 years old and although USB has been generally reliable there have been times when USB devices wouldn't connect. I once bought an APC brand 4 port USB hub that would not allow my PC to boot. So the issue is the driver and my PC though - not the NAS.
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What Windows UPnP driver are we talking about?
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This is copied from Sharon Crawford's article in 2002. I'm not sure if the correct term is driver or protocol but that's what was giving me the headaches.
"The UPnP specification is based on TCP/IP and Internet protocols that let devices communicate with each other. That's why it's called universal—UPnP technology doesn't rely on specific device drivers, using instead these standard protocols. UPnP devices can automatically configure network addressing, announce their presence on a network subnet, and permit the exchange of device and service descriptions. A Windows XP-based computer can act as a UPnP control point, discovering and controlling devices through a program interface."
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Hard to imagine that driver has such basic issues since it would be updated periodically from Windows updates, and there are probably many-many millions of systems using it.
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For whatever reason the issue is definitely my PC.
It's most likely a missing or corrupted system file. For example for whatever reason I cannot go to Windows update and do my updates. The updates download OK but then fail to install. I can only let them install automatically or I can go to the download folder and install them individually completely manually. I've had this problem for about 3 years now.
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Have you tried running SFC /SCANNOW from a command prompt?
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Yes when the problem started and it found nothing at that time. It wouldn't hurt to try it again this evening so I'll give it a shot when I get home.
The fact is that this was only a minor inconvenience until my NAS came along and now that the NAS issue seems to be solved the issue is back to being minor enough to continue to live with it.
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Phil,
Hmmmm. I recently purchased the DNS-321 too. I had a much older 1/2 TB NAS that I had been using for quite a while. When I first installed it, I installed it directly to my router 10/100 based linksys wrt54g. I was having similar problems. I was trying to move everything off my old unit to this new one. Crash, Crash, Crash. I was thinking about returning it. I had already updated to the latest firmware. I had been wanting to switch my network over to 1000 base for a long time, and with all the video streaming that has been going in my house that was part of what I was going to be doing when I installed the new DNS-321. Well, to make this long story short....I installed D-link 1000 base network switch in my system with one line running to the router. Everything else connected to the switch. I can now transfer data of any size file without issue. My other Nas had been working fine. It was only the DNS-321 that was having the problem. I probably wouldn't have never noticed this issue if I hadn't gone cheap when I first bought it.
I wonder if all the other people here where already running base 1000? I have no idea if this will help you. But it truly answered my problems with the unit. I am really liking it now. My old unit would run the drive all day long. I really like how this drive tries to conserve energy, and put less milage on my drive.
Just a thought.
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and I thought I was unique. LOL.
Actually. I'm running a GB router and then a D-Link GB switch. My PC is connected to the router. Everything else is connected to the switch. The weak hardware link is my PC's NIC as it's 10/100.
Anyway. it still seems like my problem has gone away simply by unplugging the USB cable to my printer and just leaving it connected by ethernet.
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Are you saying you had a USB and Ethernet connection to your printer? I'm almost certain that is not a "recognized" configuration, it's an either/or situation.
That might also explain the odd results.
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Are you saying you had a USB and Ethernet connection to your printer? I'm almost certain that is not a "recognized" configuration, it's an either/or situation.
That might also explain the odd results.
Yes I did. But I've had that printer for a couple of years and it never had problems. Each connection is setup separately as if the USB connection were one printer and the network connection were another. I could print to either at will. I really doubt that was the problem.
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I really doubt that was the problem.
And yet when you removed that configuration the issue was resolved... ;)
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Go figure.
Actually, it's happened to me that for whatever reason a USB device wouldn't connect but the next day it would be fine. Other devices can be picky. For example, I have a Samsung Q1 MP3 player that will only connect to one of my 12 USB ports (including 8 USB ports through my hubs). The connection to my PDA needs to be reconfigured to synch properly.
For all I know, I could reconnect the USB cable now to the printer and it would be fine for the rest of my life.
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I have both a DNS-321 and a DNS-323. Both have had multi-gigabyte transfers to them many times, and there has never been an issue. If this is a NAS issue, it's a hardware issue with your unit.
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Yeah, I would saying having a printer hooked up with two paths would not be a good idea. But why would that effect the transmissions to and from the NAS? Glad to hear that fixed your problem though. We have two networked printers on our system, but neither is anywhere near a computer so no usb connections being made. I was wondering myself if having one device hooked up by a 100b connection, and the other by a 1000b connection was causing problems at the computer doing the transfer? Not being able to handle the flow - one device expected high flow, and the other not being able to do it. The problem was at the computer and the OS. But when I made it so that the flow to both NASs was the same at the computer no problem would occur. I really don't think the problem that I was having was the NAS at all as other people have said. I think the NAS just showed a weakness in WinXP, or the driver for my NIC. I've noticed a similar problem when trying to use a USB hard drive in a USB1.0 port. Very hard to move large amounts of data without crash. If a run from a USB2.0 port no worries. ???
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I've run with my NAS units on 100mbit and gigabit connections in various combinations. There should never be an issue like this, the only effect I see is the speed difference.
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Yeah, I would saying having a printer hooked up with two paths would not be a good idea, sorry. But why would that effect the transmissions to and from the NAS? Glad to hear that fixed your problem though. We have two networked printers on our system, but neither is anywhere near a computer so no usb connections being made. I was wondering myself if having one device hooked up by a 100b connection, and the other by a 1000b connection was causing problems at the computer doing the transfer? Not being able to handle the flow - one device expected high flow, and the other not being able to do it. The problem was at the computer and the OS. But when I made it so that the flow to both NASs was the same at the computer no problem would occur. I really don't think the problem that I was having was the NAS at all as other people have said. I think the NAS just showed a weakness in WinXP, or the driver for my NIC. I've noticed a similar problem when trying to use a USB hard drive in a USB1.0 port. Very hard to move large amounts of data without crash. If a run from a USB2.0 port no worries. ???
Well, I can add to your thought, but not in a good way, sorry. I have a DNS-321, a DNS-323, A Win XP Pro desktop, a laptop with Win 7 and a Motorola wireless modem/router, all running through a Netgear gigabit switch. And I also have 4 external hard drives hooked to various machines within this system too via USB 2.0. Everything is gigabit, CAT6 wiring, except for the modem that is 10/100 only and the laptop on wireless.
When I hooked the last piece into the system, the DNS-323, everything else kept moving data as normal, but the DNS-323 wouldn't take more than 100-200 megs without crashing, saying the address that was receiving the data had disappeared. I tested for a few days, moving a 1 gig data file around from all different connections. And then at the end of day 2, out of the blue, the 323 suddenly started to take that 1 gig file in 1 swallow, just like everything else. And it's been fine ever since, about 2 weeks now.
I never changed any of the configs or downloaded/updated any drivers through those 2 days. So, call it a gut feeling, but I am still leaning towards the O/S as being the problems, not the DNS units or the amount of data at any 1 time. I didn't see at any time where I was saturating any of the network cards to the point of collapse.
Just my 2 cents worth, in case it helps anyone else with a diagnosis.
Sincerely yours,
Ryder
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Ghosts? ;) That's pretty odd, maybe it needed a "break-in". :D
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Ghosts? ;) That's pretty odd, maybe it needed a "break-in". :D
Personally, in my case, I think it was the new cable I used. You know how tight the kinks are in them until they relax a bit. ;) ;) ;D
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That's it, the knots in the cable... :D
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Well, I can add to your thought, but not in a good way, sorry. I have a DNS-321, a DNS-323, A Win XP Pro desktop, a laptop with Win 7 and a Motorola wireless modem/router, all running through a Netgear gigabit switch. And I also have 4 external hard drives hooked to various machines within this system too via USB 2.0. Everything is gigabit, CAT6 wiring, except for the modem that is 10/100 only and the laptop on wireless.
When I hooked the last piece into the system, the DNS-323, everything else kept moving data as normal, but the DNS-323 wouldn't take more than 100-200 megs without crashing, saying the address that was receiving the data had disappeared. I tested for a few days, moving a 1 gig data file around from all different connections. And then at the end of day 2, out of the blue, the 323 suddenly started to take that 1 gig file in 1 swallow, just like everything else. And it's been fine ever since, about 2 weeks now.
I never changed any of the configs or downloaded/updated any drivers through those 2 days. So, call it a gut feeling, but I am still leaning towards the O/S as being the problems, not the DNS units or the amount of data at any 1 time. I didn't see at any time where I was saturating any of the network cards to the point of collapse.
Just my 2 cents worth, in case it helps anyone else with a diagnosis.
Sincerely yours,
Ryder
:o That is what I was getting before I did the switch to the 1000 switch! Like the drive just disappeared! Once I put the switch in that all stopped. When I get home tonight I'm going to go and put the DNS-321 back on the linksys wrt54g, and see what happens. I had thought the switch was the trick. But maybe it wasn't??? I was getting exactly as Ryder has stated. And now it no longer happens. We'll see what happens when I change back to the original setup. If I can reproduce it, I'll blame it on something other than the NAS. If I can no longer reproduce it - ahhhhhh! I will plug it back into the 1000 switch and call it a day for now. And then I'll figure we've got a firmware issue than perhaps will disappear with the next installment. One would hope.
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That's it, the knots in the cable... :D
But, it's not knots, that's not it. It's just knot, not knots, not that I can prove it though, and not that it matters anymore, not at all! ;) ;) ;D