Storlink devices community

Hi,

I have a 2 bay Giganas fitted with 2 x Seagate 500Gb drives which has been working fine in raid 0. It has the original firmware. No attempt made to update it.

Today I noticed that it had locked up and was not visible on the network.

Experimenting to see if it was completely dead or not I disconnected the sata leads from both drives and it powered up. i could connect to the web interface where of course it said no drives present.

I then connected one drive only and powered it up. Again it worked and i could see the page saying no raid present and showing one drive. Repeating this for the second drive (ie one drive only connected) it again booted fine and the second drive position was shown as present. The unit will shut down OK on the switch.

If I connect both drives and power it up it does not boot. Power and Link lights lit solid. No activity on access light. Drives are spinning. Nothing visible on my network and no access to the web interface. The setup CD cannot find it either. it will not turn off and i have to pull the power to kill it.

The unit was used as a backup device and i have now repeated my normal backups onto plug in USB drives so whilst I'd like to have access to the data in the Giganas it is not a major problem.

Just hoping for some advice as to if the problem can be fixed.

I can only say that I have the same problem.
Since my 750 gb Samsung died, I can not create raid anymore, cause nas accepts only one disc....

Anyone of you has a serial cable to try something? You need a 232/TTL 3,3V cable

I do not have a serial cable.

I have done some more experimenting today.

Using a USB cradle I have checked the health of both drives connected to my windows 7 PC. both show as healthy and display the partitions. I have not formatted them etc in the hope there may be a fix sometime. So the drives seem to be OK

I have 2 x 160Gb sata maxtors that i no longer use. I put them in the giganas and it worked. Formatted to jbod then deleted raid and formatted to raid 0. Set up shares and workgroup then selected 40 Gb of files to copy to the new share. Started off fine but after 10 minutes windows could no longer see the giganas and the unit had locked up. Pulling the power to stop it and restarting worked but again the unit locked up after around 10 minutes of data transfer.

Putting the 2 original Seagate drives back in there is no change - does not boot properly.

I found the firmware link at the top of this forum and disconnected both drives and did the update. Took a surprisingly long time but completed successfully.... and made no difference to the problems. Still fails after 10 minutes with the maxtors and does not run with the Seagates.

I see TTL USB serial cables on ebay. What can the cable do? Don't want to throw good money after bad..

Oh and thanks for any help :)

Did you try to do a reset with rear push button?

Serial cable is useful to see NAS boot sequence on PC's screen like you're in front of a linux PC booting.
Maybe there's some error that needs input via console (like happened to me).

Sorry for my English.

Yes. I held the rear button for 10 seconds+ and the settings were reset. made no difference.

Do you know the pinouts for making a cable up? I have an old PC with a real serial port so I could probably solder something together.

Long time since I initiated comms over a serial cable so I'll need some help :)

Edit. just been searching on serial connections. seems this needs the conversion hardware because of the 3.3V and a simple cable will not work. Don't think I believe in this unit enough to spend the money on a USB cable. If I flashed the firmware then I would expect any faulty code would have been overwritten?

Hi all,
I had the same problem with two units.
The solution was the same for both cases.

Doesn't it seem weird to you that all of the sudden one of the disk dissapears ?

Usually it happened long ago & you didn't pay attention OR because you moved the box.

Here is why.

Each disk has a connector.
Those connectors are poorly weld to the motherboard.
After a while they disconnect or just get loose.

Get it weld again (IT'S HARD !) & your NAS will get back to live.

YARON.

I will check the soldering but that does not explain my problem. The unit will see only one Seagate disk at a time but it can be plugged into either of the two sata ports - both work on their own. 2 Seagate drives plugged in and it does not work at all.

Actually it does explain your problem...
When soldering is bad, the unit can't "pull" enough current to run two drives.
YARON.

I have a USB drive enclosure with its own power supply. I connected one drive to that for power and let the other get its power from the giganas unit. It still does not work with 2 x seagate drives so it is not a power issue.

If you check my earlier posts you will see the unit will function with 2 x Maxtor drives (although it dies after 10 minutes of data transfer) so it can run 2 drives.

I removed the main board from the case and inspected the solder joints on the sata sockets with a jewellers loupe and can see no sign of poor joints.

Keep the suggestions coming :)

Close to giving up on this now. I've had the maxtors running both powered from an old atx power supply so no load on the nasdrives power supply. It seemed to be going well but sometime after 10 minutes it locked up just as before. The seagates will still not start even when powered from the atx so i think we can rule out power issues. I've also used different sata cables so its not that either.

Bought this to replace a WD nas device that failed. Don't think I'll bother replacing this one. An old PC turned on for backup use only will be my new solution.

So I was clearing my desk ready to put this giganas in in bin and noticed the IDE connector.

As a last test i found 2 old IDE drives which were only 20Gb each and connected them. The unit has now been working fine for nearly an hour copying data and no lockups.

So the problem is somewhere in the sata hardware. Why it runs one drive off either port but not both together I have no idea.

Does anyone know - if I get 2 x sata to IDE adaptor units will the raid that was working on sata work on IDE?