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Backup drives

Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 7:38 am
by anglefire
Some already know that I have a couple of NAS drives to backup my computer (mostly photographs, which I have a LOT - nearly 300k) - anyway, yesterday I wanted to look at the config of the drive (I was setting up an FTP server). Anyway it was dead.
So checked the PSU - was fine in so far as was giving out 12V - but swapped to my other NAS PSU and that was the same.
Took the box apart to check the internal fuse (Hasn't got one!) but did check the voltage coming in - about 2V - so concluded that the board had as fault somewhere and the PSU was folding back.

So did some research and the choice came down to QNAP or Synology. My current drives are Qnap so my bias is towards them.

Looked at some fairly high end boxes but decided to go for a 4bay Qnap 431P2 and a couple of 4Tb Seagate Ironwolf HD's - the 4Tb seemingly the best bang for buck currently at just under £100 each.

So ordered from amazon and the box is arriving today and the drives tomorrow.

This morning had a bit of a brain wave and unplugged one of the drives - tried again and it booted up. :oops:

Plugged the drive back in and still booted up :oops: :oops:

Put it back into its home and dead. :o

Took it back apart and it looks like the plug onto the motherboard is a little dodgy.

So after a little wiggle its working again.

So now I'll have 3 NAS drives on the desk...........

I should also say, I have a Livedrive cloud backup of all my files too - some 8Tb of data is on that account though when I changed computers it effectively doubled the backup!

Re: Backup drives

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2018 8:26 am
by jamespope
I had a similar issue with one of my Readynas boxes, one of the HDDs was on it's death rattle and was generating so many ATA errors that the box slowed right down to a crawl - so much that I couldn't even use the web interface let alone access any files. After a bit of mildly panicked pondering I yanked the offending drive out - happy as Larry again. Seems so odd that the thing would let itself get into such a state of mal rather than declaring the drive dead moving on with it's life.

When the time comes for me to replace them i think im going to buy some second hand enterprise file severs off ebay and see if can run freenas on them or windows server or something similar. You can pick up some fairly well spec'd servers (compared to the readnas anyway) for <£100 with 10 or so drive bays. Just need some garage space to put a 19" rack.