Repairs & Compatibility with older units

[RJSmith]

I have two QNAP 453 Pros. Unit 1 is our main location for data and it's set up to RSYNC to unit 2.

Last night, unit 1 stopped working. I think it might be the power supply, but not 100% sure at this stage as I was focussed on getting data recovered. For various reasons, the sync only happens once a day, so consequently, unit 2 was not a completely up to date copy of unit 1. Ordinarily, this is not a huge problem, but there was some data that was placed on unit 1 earlier that day that would be difficult to reproduce.

To get things running with as little downtime as possible, I simply took the drives out of unit 1 and put them into unit 2. I then renamed unit 2 to the name that unit 1 had, changed it's IP address (we have some equipment that looks for unit 1 by fixed IP) and rebooted. This worked fine, but now I'm faced with the task of either getting the dead unit 1 repaired, or replacing it.

So my presales questions are:

It is possible and/or cost effective to repair a dead 453 Pro? It's about 2.5 - 3 years old.

If repair is not an option, which new unit should I be looking to purchase? A 451+ ? It's important that any new unit I buy should allow me to take all the drives from a 453 Pro and swap them over (as in the example above)

Thanks.

[storageman]

Depends what's wrong, 453 Pro has replaceable PSU
http://shop.qnap.com/index.php?route=pr ... duct_id=71

[Briain]

Hi

I'd contact Qnap support (via raising a ticket) as that model is still supported (in terms of hardware repairs) and see what it would cost to send it back for testing and repair. I recently enquired about a 453 hardware repair and yes, it that case it was cost effective. As stated above, it could just be the power supply, but it isn't a given that's what failed (it could be the circuit that starts the power supply, or the first stages to which that power supplies power, for example) so before forking out for a replacement, you'd be best to either get someone to measure it (to see if it is poking out sensible Voltages, which is easy to do - by using a multimeter on DC Voltage range - when you have two identical units sitting side by side) or even try swapping the power supplies between models to see if the fault moves with the power supply. Whilst that trick should be safe enough to do, it also introduces a risk of damage, so if you must go down that road (rather than measuring things) I'd suggest trying the power supply from the working one in the dead one, rather than doing it the other way around (just in case a duff power supply is putting out a higher Voltage than it should and thus takes out the working NAS, too; again, an unlikely failure mode, but most certainly not an impossibility).

Of course, if it is in a mission critical roll, that might be extremely bad advice to give as you could end up with 2 broken units, but if you do go down that faulting road (or ask someone else to do so) be sure you (or the person attempting the test) wears anti-static protection, as an accidental discharge - from a person touching the innards without same protection - can severely damage the NAS's internal circuitry; static charges can easily be as high 10s of thousands of Volts and many of the internal components are designed to work at 5 Volts (and the RAM is designed to work at just 1.3 Volts) so some of the semiconductors used are extremely vulnerable to damage from static discharge, which can flash across their tiny 'junctions' (so a finger poked in the wrong place can result in their total demise)!

It is really quite surprising* that in this day and age, many technicians (and even some degreed engineers) still don't seem to take static damage seriously.

Bri

* Yes, I was tempted to say 'shocking', but I suspect such a pun would result in an immediate forum ban (and quite rightly so)!

[Trexx]

If you decide to buy a new NAS instead of repairing your current one, see the NAS Migration Guide: http://docs.qnap.com/nas/4.3/cat2/en/sy ... ration.htm to determine if you can move the drives or not.

Now the other question after CAN you do it is SHOULD you do it. Depending on whether you configured your original NAS on QTS v3.x or 4.x, whether you are using Storage Pools, etc. in many cases it is better to start from scratch on the new NAS so you are positioned to take advantage of QNAPs latest enhancements (Snapshots, Storage Pools, Snapshot Folders, etc.). Since you have the 'backup' NAS, you could take the drives from the "backup" NAS and install those into your new NAS if you decide to go down that road vs. repairing your older model.

Reformat them to leverage the new capabilities, and then Sync your data back from your current NAS to the new one. Then either reverse the process, or even reformat the backup NAS drives to leverage similar capabilities as new NAS prior to syncing from your new one.

[Briain]

Hi

I do always to start from afresh and recently, I moved from a 453 Pro to a 453A and with it being one of the first 453 Pros in the UK, it had no storage pool (that option only appeared in later 453 firmware versions) and also, it had been updated (many times) all the way from firmware version 3.8.x to 4.3.x, so I rather fancied a 'clean install', anyway.

Having said that, I thought I'd give migration a shot (just to see how well the process worked; nothing to lose by checking it out) so I swapped the disks over and started the 453A, then as prompted, let it go through the firmware update process. It didn't go through any migration activities (I was not prompted for them) so my guess is that it was so architecturally similar that the migration process was not required (just the firmware upgrade) and it all worked a treat. I did suggest (to Qnap) that they slightly revise the wording in the manual; in step 7 of the procedure - Click "Start Migrating"... - it implies that you will (not might) be prompted to go through the migration process, so it did briefly concern me that something hadn't gone as planned (but no, it all worked flawlessly).

Whilst that was a great success, I'm not sure I'd fancy a migration from two radically different models (ARM to Intel, for example) but I guess that Qnap must have tested such an activity very thoroughly before releasing it, so I assume that as long as the migration list shows the migration as being a valid one, likely it will also work very well.

I did have some existing problems with VM station in the 453 Pro (these occurred with the move from FW 3.x.x. to 4.x.x) and as expected, these also migrated over to the new model, so after having tested everything (just to check the migration process was as painless as it seemed) I then blew it all away and built it from afresh, this time with a thick owners storage pool (or was it a thick volume storage pool; it was something like that, anyway).

So, just a quick note to say that it worked well between these two models (but of course, assuming you are in the same position as I was and you do now want to set up storage pools, then just as is highlighted by Trexx, there is no option but to back it up, start from afresh and then populate the new NAS from the backup.

Bri

[RJSmith]

Cool. Thanks for the replies. I'll try the repair option first and see if that's an option.