Seagate 3TB 1-Bay Network Attached Storage

01/10/2017 - we had to move to a new home and it was switched off for 2 weeks, the Unit is dead and cant be started. all my raid data has to be sent to a special disk restore company to restore (costs). i have to do a similar restore before 3 months as the segate raid would see the disks as foreign (just when i moved from one floor to another after shutting down properly). what a waste of time and money over 2 years. This will go into "for Parts" sale this week. feel very bad about the purchase and spending so much money and get us in heart attack mode when we first see that it does not work. (had to reduce the 5 start to Zero Stars) Seagate , i trusted you. but not anymore. these 2 years i have to replace all the disks twice and since they were in warranty i escaped. but the foreign disk issue is unbeleivable (you guys should have better tools to examine and put them back into the raid groups they were before), such a waste that i have to spend money to put them into the same raid levels on to a hanging ubuntu desktop then transfer data back when the disks are formatted. Please dont sell products like these when the netgear products are lasting for the past 2 plus years and no issues even once. i just ordered the QNAP 4 bay 4K storage unit this week to replace this 12/30/2014: in a nutshell, works awesome. but needs lot of skills to set this up. once if raid group were created, the groups are not accessable in windows, until you check this box NFS (network file share) which does not make much sence because it is one single option for all the raid groups you have. I wish you have one for each. but that is ok for now atleast i was able to get rid of other issues. the main issue i saw when regrouping the raid levels (like remove everything and start), the partitions that were created by seagate were not removeed even when i removed the disk and claieed them. so i have to take every individual disk out of the system and put into a cirago docking station (disk reader) and connect each of the disk one at a time to the computer using usb 3. then it shows up as 15 partitions, started removing every partition using disk management in windows and once there were no more allcations, put them back into the seagate NAS now shows up with all the space. Seriously seagate, you dont have an option to claim the entire disk when you say the disk will be claimed ? copy is faster and encryption raid 1 setup was slow. did not yet try copying files. simply to say the array is very good and gives good performance, but scratch everything (including the certs) and rebuit it from scratch, it works like a charm. also remeber the NFS check box under sharing menu. this is very important. while initially setting up the nas, (once you put no partition disks, the software will kick in, if you visit the ip address on a web page). please remember to give it a nice name that you remenber and followed by a static ip (just change the last 3 of the IP to 100 or 200) so it wont be hit by your local network range. if you leave it at dynamic, everytime you restart the router, the ip changes and it is horrable to setup any automated jobs). wometimes wont reboot if you press the hard reset, always try the hard reset on the box and wait for sometime, if it does not work then unplug. dont unplug immediately. i was able to put 2 tb times 3 plus a 3 tb to mix and match the 1 raid 5 and 3 raid 1 and a raid0 setting. no issues works awesome. seagate person said that we could call the helpdesk to have to give a live support from mon to fri upto 6 pm central time, but never used it also when a device is such challenging, it gives an opportunity to learn every aspect of it, which i like it. so i am going to keep this for a long time. also i am using rich copy to initially copy files from each of the windows to this for now. once the first copy is done, i will be using a batch file to copy through windows task schedular. will update on how that goes, also i tried removing a disk and putting it back, works well. had to give it some time to recogonize the disk. user name and permissions are waste. i guess we cant have a setup with tight security on few raid disks but liberal on some. either or is the case. for now wish you all a Happy new Year 2015 and buy this Seagate device with confidence to learn the ins and outs of NAS setup etc. initially it was frustrating, but now it has become fun and i love it. 12/15/2014: it does not support windows 8.1. software licenses is not part of the package? so the customer support tried to see by running arp -a on the command line and wants to speak with their customer rep from 8 to 6 central time mon thru fri. my problem is the software loads fine but i cannot map a drive letter on my windows 8.1 (No kidding). the shares have been created with user name and password in the seagate web tool, but the share does not show up even with \\10.... \sharename . i am waiting to get the customer support in line and will update this site. for now it is just a star (on the device), software gets the remaining 4 zeros. worst than i ever thought. 12/6/2014: Update after a day: I dont know how everything got fixed. but the web page for the NAS Now loads with a handsome application. Lot of custom options. i guess when the lights were blinking, they automatically updated the firmware on the system. I have a 2 x2 tb + 1 x 3 tb on a RAID 5 remaining 1 tb on the third disk plus a 4th disk of 650 gb together on a RAID1 drive. building the raid volumes now. i am the most happiest person ever. (will plan to upgrade the disk capacity in future). so people connect your NAS to the internet, it does the magic. 12/5/2014: Initial Comments: Brought one this Thanksgiving. ditto on all issues, also the 4 bay link from seagate does not work on my windows 8.1 system. while installing the discovery it works. but while installing the managament piece, it fails (the second one in the installer). i have to cancel myself at that point and when i run the discovery tool, it shows up and a link to a NAS Manager button, (it only shows all the disk and you could check and erase them) there is no way to setup Raid or disk partitions in this web tool. very sad, but trying to get a way to fix. also if you initialize the disk using the NAS Manager web page, then the system does not come online until we go and hard reboot the NAS. also the lights are blinking from Disk 1 to 2 to 3 very fast doing nothing. Seagate.. please help. i brought your product after ignoring all the comments and my collegues advice to buy synergy. i hope i wont go bad will wait for couple of days to see if i could resolve all the issues.