Buffalo TeraStation - Part 2.

After I was unable to reach anybody last night, I called their support number today. It said there was a hold time of one minute, and sure enough it was 18 minutes later before somebody answered the phone. This time "Jason" is helping me. He did not know the answer to my question, so I'm on hold again while he asks somebody else...

Next time he puts me on hold, I'm going to ask him to conference me.

You'd think at a company where they sell these devices, everybody on the support line would have walked through rebuilding a RAID array and paid attention to the dialog boxes.

OK, so I was instructed that the dialog box I saw was a translation error, and that it should rebuild fine, which is now seemingly what is happening. It is "Rearing" (as evidenced from the System Status - Drive Properties screen), and it should take several hours.

Apparently I've voided my warranty, which is fine, and I'll repost if the RAID rebuild worked successfully.

Is it only me, or do others think software should be easier and companies should emphasize correct translation?

Misery with my Terastation.

I have a Buffalo TeraStation NAS device. Theoretically the device works great (after you change the frame size so you can properly support Gigabit ethernet) and provides me all the redundancy I need...until something fails and you try to get help.

So let me state for the Blogosphere that Buffalo has the WORLD'S WORST TECH SUPPORT. I was on the phone with a technician for 1 hour and 20 minutes trying to diagnose what was wrong and it was so painfully clear that he was CLUELESS. Every time I asked him a question, he put me on hold for 10 minutes while he either a) looked up the answer or b) asked a co-worker. It was RIDICULOUS. At the end of it, he sent me an RMA e-mail because he couldn't figure out what was wrong...

...Which was simply that a drive had failed (which is why you buy the box in the first place). So instead of dealing with an RMA, buying a new drive, copying all my data, then shipping back the old drive, I just went to Fry's to buy a replacement drive for $80 and I'll call Seagate to warranty the defective drive. BTW, the Buffalo web site says they use Western Digital, but all the drives in my unit are Seagate.

So I replaced the drive; a rather long and unnecessary convoluted process involving 22 screws. Why the heck can't the build a drive chassis that removes EASILY? Poor design.

But the real problem is this. Now that I'm back running my drive, I need to FIX the array, but the only option in their tool is to "restructure" the array, and when I hit "OK", it says that it "Data stored on the target disks will be deleted", and the checkboxes for ALL of the disks are selected. Now if they knew how to build a UI worth anything, they'd have not put check boxes (which are selected) next to the other drives, or they'd use a phrase like "REPAIR" RAID array and indicate that only the NEW drive that has been added is going to have its data wiped.. But.. .NOOOOOOOOOOO... some engineer with no regard whatsoever for "normal" users wrote all these dialog boxes. I am an engineer, btw, and still think their UI is disgusting.

I've now been on hold for 19 minutes, after their voice-prompt told me 8 minutes. I tried this once before and after 60 minutes I hung up. Worthless Tech support.

So since I don't at all trust their dialog boxes, I'm not formatting the array until I move things off of it, which is absurd because if I had all that storage, I wouldn't need this array.

27 minutes on hold. Last time when I called during the day I still waited about 45 minutes.

I'm going to hang up now and go to sleep, in the meanwhile, I'm copying the most critical stuff off the array before I "restructure it" to make sure that in case "restructure" does not mean "repair" and instead means "recreate", I haven't lost everything... Can't the dialog box say "I see that you've replaced a drive within an existing RAID array. Should I assume this was a replacement drive for a bad disk and integrate it to make a healthy array?" or something like that. Why scare users with "Data stored on the target disks will be deleted" and flag ALL the drives? What the heck is the point of that.

Buffalo, your tech support and manuals are HORRIBLE. The repair process isn't even documented in their manuals! How pathectic is that?

36 minutes; no answer; after it said 8 minutes. Morons.

Good night.....
-d

My four-year old, Aaron, showed me this morning just how smart he is...Now of course I think all my kids are brilliant, but Aaron may seriously be future Mensa. Anyway, so I was trimming a tree in the backyard, and he asked what I was doing and lamented about not having shade...He asked something about what the tree needed, and I told him trees only need water and sunlight and he corrected me and informed me that they also need AIR. Brilliant, of course. Not just that he learned that, but that he could put it in context and correct me when I was mistaken. Now where this would exactly fall on Bloom's taxonomy is a question; I think its clearly at least "Apply" and maybe "Analyze", which to me is a higher level. Granted other critics would simply say its "Remember" (The lowest level of Bloom's taxonomy), but the confidence that he demonstrated when he explained it to me suggest a higher level, in my humble fatherly opinion...

I had the most amazing lunch a few weeks ago. My five-year-old and I started playing tic-tac-toe... You could almost see the synapses firing as we worked through different scenarios of where to go first, who should go first, etc. I always now let him go first, and he knows to go for a corner, and if I take a side space, he'll win 90% of time time. I still will trick him now and again by taking a middle space or a corner, but each time we work through more scenarios. It was, and continues to be, a wonderful Daddy moment watching your child "figure this stuff out". The great thing is, my four-year-old also caught on, although he's not quite figuring out which squares to go in first, and doesn't block me.. But he'll figure it out soon enough...

The only graphic I should post is a crayon-laden tic-tac-toe sheet, but I don't have one :)