IcyBox - An unexpected network error occurred - IB-NAS3221-B

In December 2009 our Bufallo Terastation failed first with a corrupt Kernel then a RAID failure. We were forced to purchase a new NAS box and had to take what we could get same day on a Saturday which turned out to be an IcyBox IB-NAS3221-B from RaidSonic.

The device accepts 2 drives and we installed a new 500gb SATA unit. After an arduous 24 hour backup restore from a USB 1.0 drive and then 18 hours of copying across the network to the new NAS box we should have been set.

Several times though the first day of using the device with 4 people using it as a simple file server it was throwing errors:

• An unexpected network error occurred
• Not enough memory to complete opperation

The error happened both at random times when not much was happening and also when we were copying large amounts of files to or from the device. It seemed that anything over 600mb tripped it up or any copy operation involving more than 2000 files.

One of the Dell Desktop PCs seemed less affected when copying files than my ASUS VX2s so it looked like the network controller on my may have been part of the issue. We also tried using RoboCopy to do some copy operations but that too was unable to shift files to and from the IcyBox.

We ended up shifting the files by hand to a Synology DS508 which would allow our nightly backup routines to an external USB 2.0 devide to run without failing.

Now that the IcyBox is somewhat redundant I updated the firmware from the version shipped from the factory to the latest IB-v263n-v01.3-20090826. The firmware upgrade took about 10 minutes and went without issue.

I'm currently copying 26gb [25, 000] of files from Synology unit to the IcyBox and 2 hours in it's running away nicely at around 1.96mb/sec on our 100mbit network. If I'd had the balls to try a firmware update on a working drive looks very much like it would have saved days of time. Given the choice again there's still no way I'd risk that much data on a firmware update with no way of having a full backup available for immediate restore.

UPDATE [03 July 2010]: I noticed a few referrals coming from a topic over at Tom's Hardware and thought I should update this post.  The firmware update I applied did not resolve the issues with the NAS so it was shelved for a good few months.  Fired it back up a couple of weeks ago and the thing refuses to boot now, simply showing the word 'Booting' on the screen.  The drives did spin up but the power button did not turn the unit off.  Removing the drives produced the same results so now it's going back to the store for a credit note.