This is a NAS of some years of age and is now populated with 4 10TB Iron wolf HDDs. The drives were sourced in August/September 2020.
Last night when I was doing a recode of a number of large files I got an "unable to write to destination" message. The NAS was off line with the display window blinking and occasionally making an attempt to boot.
I've checked the power brick and it shows 12V on the appropriate pins, but this is off load.
Extracting all the HDDs and applying power caused the NAS to boot into safe mode, but after a power down and reinsertion of a single HDD, (I've tried bay 1 and bay 3 thus far) causes the NAS to attempt boot and then start flashing the display, from which point I can get to the Power down indication and shut down.
So I'm wondering if I have:
1. A power brick which is shutting down when the load is bigger than the RAW NAS (ie no HDDs loaded), or
2. An NAS which is at, or close to its end of life, or
3. Simultaneous HDD failures, I find this latter possibility unlikely.
I can test the HDDs in my desktop using Seatools, but am reluctant to do this without advise, as it might corrupt the stored contents.
I can source a new power brick and see what happens.
I can source a more moderrn NAS ( RN214 - RN314 etc). I understand that I can transfer the HDDs providing I maintain the bay order of the drives.
I'll be most appreciative of any comment or other "tests" that I might carry out to further isolate what the problem might be.
Thanks for the advice. I ran seatools basic on one of the HDDs that caused The NAS to "Shutdown" (blinking display window and attempts to boot) and it tested OK, so I concluded that the problem lay either with the NAS regulator or the power supply brick - probably the latter since NAS bootup into safe mode occurred when no HDDs were connected.
Tested the supply brick with a 36 Watt load (about 43% of its capacity) and that caused it to fail completely, so I'm hoping that it was operating with limited output until I forced the issue.
New supply sourced so I'll be waiting to see if this solves the issue.
I'll update when the next test with a new Power Supply is done.
The new power brick arrived which turned out to be an after market device with a short adapter cable changing the standard 12V plug to the 4 pin DIN connector. Did some checks to ensure the voltage polarities on the DIN connector matched the graphic on the Netgear brick and all good.
So attach the brick and see what happens. RN104 went through its boot up process and I can happily use File Explorer to examine the stored contents.
Big sigh of relief.
But in the interim an NAS Duo that gets switched on from time to time failed to "wake up". Some testing revealed that another Netgear power brick had failed. So 2 of them in a matter of weeks. As the house has surge arrestors on the distribution board and the NAS devices are powered through a UPS I have trouble believing a poweer surge might be the cause.
Has anyone else experienced Netgear supplied power units failing unexpectedly? The build dates on the two I have are July 2011 (Duo) and March 2014 (RN104).
I'm a bit surprised that since the RN104 was operational when its power supply failed it is not currently doing a logwinded resyncing process.
Note to self: Start looking for a bigger capacity back up system. Although the critical stuff is backed up in a couple of USB HDDs the full contents of the RN104 (non critical) did take some time to assemble so having a copy would be a time saver.
Since Netgear is out of the NAS business I'm open to suggestions about 4 bay NAS devices.
