Gadgetory

what I have before me is a $2,000 brick with 20 terabytes of inaccessible data on it it's part of the problem with network-attached storage is if something goes wrong you can't really service it it's not like if we did a DIY server which is by the way what we're doing next and we have here a problem with either the power supply or the motherboard or the power board or some proprietary component inside of this sign Allah GDS 15 15 plus it's apparently a very common issue and if you push the power button doesn't come on anymore so today we're gonna try and troubleshoot this and see what the heck is going on and if there's a good way to fix it before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the vo 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focused build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 quick back story on this so it's a 20 terabyte raid which means 14 terabytes is accessible and usable by us we have all of our b-roll on here compressed and uncompressed we have our finished files on here that get uploaded to YouTube we have our product designs our logos our software basically everything except for a really critical business tax document stuff like that and we've got a remote backup through a backup service that has some of that stuff backed up about well most of the finished files most a really important stuff is there but there's some stuff on here that we need like brand-new product files we've been working on things that we haven't backed up yet because they're like new this week and that will be addressed later working on a better backup solution so anyway this is some sign ology nass it's a really common point of failure for this particular model and other models made in this year to not turn on anymore which is great it's the best thing to deal with in a business is to just randomly have all your operations grind to a halt for seemingly no good reason and another problem with this series of Nass is not just the power delivery randomly dying but also the Intel processor that's in here it's some atom or something it's got some security vulnerabilities and then it also has its own issue of randomly died so I was kind of hoping that we got one of the updated ones thinking well we're a media outlet they should send us a good one but nope they didn't cherry-pick it so we got what any customer would get which is a dead mass and we I've already purchased a replacement unfortunately the problem with some of this is that in order to migrate the raid and not lose all the data I did have to buy another sign ology and ask what our next move is going to be a custom server and it's something we're working on for a couple of months from now I built servers for our web server in the past it's not a big deal but we should just do that at this point because the thing is with this it doesn't work and I can't really do much about it because all proprietary parts in the most part so yes I can buy a new power supply for the unit on eBay it'll get here in three or four weeks from China I can buy maybe a motherboard for it but it's unlikely and motherboard failures are pretty common and a lot of them are already bought so that leaves us with a question of what the hell do we do to get our data that's not backed up yet off of this thing safely and make sure that we can continue to operate so again the problem is with these things they are not user serviceable and if I build my own damn - which I'm capable of but decided not to cuz this seems like one of those you plug it in and just works types of type of thing and it did just work for a couple of years but when it didn't just work anymore it was potentially a catastrophic failure that cost the business a lot of money a lot of files and stuff that we can't really get back or recreate so that's the problem with it if this happened on my own server I built and I knew it's a motherboard or a CPU or a power supply I have shelves of those components and I can swap it out in 15 minutes and be done whereas this might take me weeks to get a power supply I might never be able to get a motherboard or it won't be of all in terms of price so let me show you a couple of things here first of all will save everyone some time you can unlock these drives which the lock is really just kind of stupid anyway but you can unlock the drives and pull them out and in doing so it will sometimes help to completely reset everything so this is a troubleshooting stuff I already did basically you pull every drive out label them so let you know what order they go back in what slot so you can recover the raid but if you have this problem you pull all the drives out first let it sit leave it alone unplug the power and see if it turns back on hopefully does and if it doesn't turn back on that should that's pretty close to resetting the CMOS like in terms of what it does for recovery it doesn't turn back on here's a thing I learn in the past few days you open this thing up that's ATX power in fact actually completely unintentional plugging of our mod mat which I'm using right now so let's take a look at this this is a very well planned by accident what we have here let's take a look at a green because there's only really one of them so green and ground right here that's gonna be the fourth pin over on its row and it's got a black on either side and a blue over here and then an orange on the end so this is our mod pack you go to store document access net to pick it up if you want it it's a great modding and building service but it also has pin out diagrams like this so let's look over at the pin out now so I said there's a Dan orange blue black green orange blue black green black black black and then should be blank yep blank red red red and then it should be black yep so this is actually the same pin out as an ATX 24-pin power plug which means we can actually just plug in a computer power supply and see if this is a power supply problem and start troubleshooting from there these get these are super tightly crammed in there so I use a flathead to just pry it out so we can unplug that and now what we're going to do is a simple test with a power supply tester so here's one of those that I happen to already have fortunately so we plug this in right here okay so it's got power so this is a power supply tester it's got all the different voltages on the front of it so there's like twelve five so forth and one of our 12 volt rails over here is not reporting 12 volts the LDL indicator that you're seeing on this 12 volt line really just means if there's no EPS 12 volt cable connected so this actually seems like it passes the test we're still not really sure what the problem is the problem further is that the hard drive power is a special connector so hard drive power is in here a whole bunch of red 5 volt whole bunch of yellow 12 volt bunch of black foreground that is not a standard power supply connector so a few solutions here one is if this is a power supply problem and if this cable is also bad or whatever is the power delivery in general is bad I could solder molex or SATA connectors to these solder the red yellow and black wires together and it would work just take a day because it's a lot of cables or I can order a replacement $350 to replace this stupid power supply which is like under 300 Watts 250 watt custom power supply 350 bucks ships from China won't get here for 4 weeks that's on the in except unacceptable so that leaves us with a troubleshooting option which is going to be let's plug in a computer ATX power supply so I pulled this one out that we weren't using and all that happens here is I plug in this 24 pin which has the same I'm it's all black out cables unfortunately but same exact pin out as you saw in our mod mat which is on here so it's safe so we can plug this in the motherboard and I'll just go ahead and plug again that mod mat the pin out diagrams helped us significantly for PCIe fans and for 24 pin now so if you do want to grab it the next round will be here within I think it should be shipping to us already actually yes it is shipping to us already so that means it'll be going out to you guys within about a week or so filming this so anyway plugged in what we're not gonna do is plug in anything down here except for this power supply so this one still needs to get power and I don't know if this 24-pin needs to be jumped I don't know if it will even do anything but we're just gonna go ahead and plug in a jumper cable anyway because why not and we're gonna leave these hard drive cables plugged in so now the unit needs power and the EVGA power supply needs power so let me plug those in okay so plugging everything in and now in theory all I have to do is flip the switch on the EVGA power supply and push the button on here is it on yes so you can see that blue light blinking now so our Nass has gone from being completely 100% unresponsive on the sine Allah GDS 15 15 plus doesn't work 20 terabytes minus the provisioning space but or the rounding space call it 14 terabytes 14 terabytes potentially gone again we have some of it backed up not that stupid but it's not not everything is some of the b-roll for example we don't need it it's not desperate need its back it up but we didn't have it backed up and I want it so either way it's several terabytes of data some of it more expensive to lose than others and we're able to access it now and in order to get the drives to kick on I just have to plug in an Ethernet cable so they're not on if we plug in let's just plug that in just to kind of prove a point here we got the power on beep and we have green status LED we have al an LED on everything appears to be working oh not sure if it's a dead power supply or dead power delivery or bad motherboard or bad power board or whatever but it's working now and basically the problem here boils down to something that is not necessarily easy to fix this is okay it's not a difficult fix but clearly we can't just operate we could but you don't really want to operate with just an external power Slyke ATX power supply sitting outside your Nass because I don't know how trustworthy I don't know what other kinds of problems that could introduce the the power is no longer coming from the same source so we're splitting power from one power supply for the hard drives and this power supply is clearly already there defective or something's wrong with the 24-pin specifically and another power supply for the rest so not really something you want to trust your business with and at this point we have like I said most that's backed up I can pull everything else off now that I want now that it's bootable and then start getting this thing out the door and we have to buy another sign ology box just to migrate the raid I'm going to download it locally first or safety all that stuff don't don't worry about us in terms of making sure the data safe because I will it'll be fine but this is a problem that I've always had with NASA's and now I think our next step is going to be building a server which I want us to do this for a while we built our web server it's all Linux and everything not a big deal that for us to do just kind of waiting on the Silverstone cs3 81 I think that we showed you at Computex I really want to use that case for our server so once we have our own server the motherboard dies power supply dies whatever we've got a whole shelf of them and we're gonna be a bit safer with the raids and stuff like that still gonna have an ass it'll still do local file storage for test data for backups we have remote backups it all be and is presently safe in terms of data but I wanted to show you the troubleshooting steps here so if you run into this problem with one of these types of boxes or another one fortunately it's not too difficult to fix this particular problem but that's if you have this specific problem the greater issue still lies that all this stuff is semi proprietary and not necessarily easy to get your hands on especially for an older unit where it's just not on eBay anymore or something like that and none of its a permanent fix anyway so that is the NASS problem we have that almost cost us a lot of data and a lot of money but we're good now and learn from it obviously and we'll be moving to a better solution in the future though I did still have to spend like $1200 unexpectedly on a replacement Nash because was not able to send one out on emergency notice which is fine we don't really talk with them too much anyway so that's understandable but it was a big unexpected expense and once this is done with we'll never have to deal with it again fortunately so that's it for this one as always he could have stored out gamers access dotnet to pick up the mod map that we showed at this video it was an awesome very organic plug for that one I'm pretty happy with it actually most at almost that Linus levels of plugging stuff or we go to patreon.com/scishow stops out there if you prefer subscribe for more I'll see you all next time