Tag Archives: storage

The QNAP of Death

Alternate title: the day my NAS died

A QNAP NAS with System Booting text

Not quite the same System Booting text I was greeted with, but close enough. Excuse the dust.

System booting? Yes but the system has been booting for literally hours now. If it hasn’t booted within five minutes, there’s something wrong.

And dear reader, there was indeed something wrong. I tried all the usual stuff; turning it off and on again, leaving it off for a couple of days, pulling all the hard drives out, turning it off and on in between all of those steps, but nothing worked, nor did it give me any kind of video output to indicate what might be wrong. It turned on, but wouldn’t boot into the OS. That probably should have been my first clue that although something was wrong, maybe it wasn’t completely dead. And if it wasn’t completely dead, then maybe there was something we could do to fix it.

But after unplugging every piece of hardware I had added to the QNAP and returning it to the stock hardware configuration, the thing would still not boot up properly, giving me that same error message. System booting. Whatever was wrong with it, it wasn’t because of something I had added or done to the system, which probably meant it was hardware-related. Ugh.

With my extensive troubleshooting prowess exhausted, it was time to turn to old mate Google.

Google immediately led me to a 100-page forum thread about the issue on QNAP own forums. This was either very good, or very bad. In my case it meant it was initially very bad because it meant I had to read through most of it, but then things turned out very good because within those 100 pages, there was the trifecta: a known recurring issue, exact steps to diagnose that specific issue, and a fix that worked for enough people for it to be considered the official unofficial fix.

The problem, as it was described, is some kind of “degraded” LPC clock. As I understand it, basically there’s some kind of timing component that keeps things in your PC running on time for lower-pin (Intel’s definition of lower-pin here actually means 1170 soldered pins) processors like the Intel Celeron J1900 in the QNAP that I have. What happens is that in some systems, including in my QNAP and even some Synology units, that the circuit for this LPC clock degrades over time due to “reasons”, and eventually reaches a state where it fails to provide a stable clock to the system, meaning that the CPU doesn’t work like it should. Or something along those lines, anyway.

According to the forum post it’s remarkably similar to an issue that affected the Intel C2000 Atom processors, which Cisco and Synology both issued advisories about all the way back in 2017, although that case was slightly more serious as it caused C2000 Atom-equipped gear to fail after as short as 18 months. In the case of my QNAP, it lasted over six years. Not bad, but buyer beware, I guess, not that you’d be able to tell this kind of thing at the time of purchase.

Thankfully, diagnosing the issue is pretty easy. Use a multimeter to measure the voltage between some pins or pads on the motherboard, depending on your specific model of QNAP, and if the voltage shows over 2V, your LPC CLK is likely broken and needs to be fixed if you want to use your NAS again.

The fix is easy enough as well. Because we need to drop the voltage of the LPC CLK signal, we can drop in a resistor. Experimentation by some helpful forum members indicated that a 100 Ohm resistor, soldered between the “negative cycle transistor” and ground, will restore the voltage to a correct value to allow the LPC CLK to supply a correct clock signal to the CPU.

Simple, right?

There was just one problem. Well, besides “the problem”. I don’t own a multimeter, nor a soldering iron. Oh, and I don’t really know how to solder. I’ve soldered before, but I wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at it. But as my old swimming coach used to say, no one is born knowing how to swim or solder, so I grabbed a cheap and cheerful soldering iron, some solder, a multimeter, and prepared myself for the hackiest soldering job in the world. Yes, it was really that bad. No, I didn’t trim the ends of the resistor. Yes, I probably should have. Yes, I managed to melt a little plastic connector next to where I was soldering, but in my defence, it was impractical to pull out the entire motherboard for easier access, so I kind of had to do it in situ while it was still attached to the case, which made it all the more awkward. No, I’m not going to show you a picture. Suffice to say, I got the job done. Just.

After all was said and done, and I put my drives back into the system, it booted up just fine. Not that I didn’t expect it to, given so many other people had had success after attempting the same fix, but it was still a relief. Getting the system back up and running again meant I didn’t have to try and go to lengths to recover the data I cared about, never mind wondering what was on there that I might have forgotten about in the first place.

I wish that was the end of the story. Alas, the forum had one more golden nugget of information to dispense, and that was that the fix was only temporary. Continued degradation of the clock timer was inevitable, and the next time it failed, there was no guarantee it would be fixable with any kind of resistor. It was hard to estimate how long the fix would work for, but six months to a couple of years seemed reasonable. Reasonable, but only if you were willing to put up with the fact that your NAS might die at any moment, and maybe even be completely unrecoverable from that point on.

Which worked for me, because now I knew that it was on the way out, it was time to build a replacement.

NAS thoughts

IMG_3508When I moved to Brisbane, I decided against bringing my NAS with me. I can’t remember my reasoning at the time, but it was probably something along the lines of “my external storage requirements won’t be as extravagant if I’m living alone, without an NBN connection”. Besides, I had my directly-connected external USB hard drive if I needed to store anything, the same external hard drive that I’m using for Time Machine. With that mindset, I loaded up a couple of my favourite TV shows and things I thought I’d be able to watch, and figured I could either re-acquire the rest or collect it the next time I was in Hobart.

It’s been long enough that I’m starting to miss my media collection. I’ve re-acquired a bunch of stuff in the meantime, but it’s just not the same, you know? My ad-hoc acquisitions aren’t of the same calibre as my carefully-curated collection back home, and what’s more, I’m starting to worry about the ever-shrinking space on my external hard drive. Plus, there’s the stuff that just isn’t available anymore, or is enough of a pain to re-acquire that I haven’t bothered.

Which is why I’m thinking about another NAS. A NAS solves all my problems: it lets me access all my media from a device other than my Mac, it helps alleviate the storage situation on my external hard drive, and if I bring a NAS back home and make another copy of all my media, then I’ll be able to access all my old media, like nothing ever changed.

But it’s 2016 now, and NAS devices are a touch more complicated than buying a $200 HP MicroServer, stuffing as many drives as I can in it, and calling it a day. I can still buy a MicroServer, of course, but they’re a touch more expensive now, so what else is out there?

Continue Reading →

Dropbox? lolwut?

What exactly is Dropbox?

Dropbox is the easiest way to share and store your files online.

No complicated interface to learn. Dropbox runs in the background on your desktop.

Sync your files automatically to your computers and the web.

Sign in and access your files from any browser or mobile device.

Sharing files with your friends and family is just two clicks away.

View your photos in a gallery and share them easily with anyone.

via Dropbox – Dropbox Tour – Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy..

Right, so I’ll do a mini-review of DropBox in a while, but for now, here’s a small taster.

Watch the screencast for more info.

Runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX. Free, and you get 2GB storage.

However, if you sign up via my referral link, you get an additional 250MB, and so do I. It’s a win-win!

So if you’re thinking of signing up (it’s free, and you’ll get 2.25GB straight off the bad if you hit my referral link), hit up my referral link. Thanks!

Using the Earth as a hard drive?

Where Google gets all that Gmail hard drive space.

★ The Joy of Tech! ★.

…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.

From Boing Boing Gadgets:

BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?

I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.

If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.

Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 😛

Cool, huh?