serpentello wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2020 11:03 pm
My question is.
What functions I will loose bypassing them?
If they are there they must have a function I guess.
I'm only guessing, since we don't have a nice clear circuit diagram to look at, but I suspect it's related to controlling the power either on initial power up of the NAS, or when you hot swap a drive. Something to delay powering on a device or slowly ramp up the power to avoid any sudden power supply draw or feed to the hard drive.
If that's the case, the effect of this fix is to bypass that mechanism resulting in heavier wear and tear on your power supply or hard drive.
You can probably google mosfet switching circuit examples or SATA controller power switching to get some answers.
chripopper wrote: ↑Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:38 am
I noticed that there were solder joints just above and below the mosfets, and tracked the circuits on the board and did some measuring. And with my limited knowledge in electronics my conclusion was that connecting these solder joints would bypass the mosfets, feeding the disks constantly with 12 and 5v.
So i just soldered them together and the disks were fully functional again!
Attached is a photo where i did the soldering. IIRC the upper circles is 12v and the lower ones is 5v.
Thanks for sharing the solution for your board, nice job diagnosing it! Based on the picture it looks like the points you found were a resistor in parallel with the mosfet (I think the label is R##?). End result would be the same, bypassing the mosfet.
No problem and thank you! No there were no resistors, just empty solder pads like it was prepared for a resistor. I think the label was B##?? My conclusion was that the left pad was input voltage to the mosfet and the right pad was switched output voltage to the HDD. So it seemed like it was prepared to bypass the mosfets.
I think the only purpose of them is to shut down disks when not in use. Maybe also to start the disks sequentially to avoid high start up currents.
Bypassing the mosfets will of course make them spin constantly.
Again I have very limited knowledge in electronics, I'm only guessing
chripopper wrote: ↑Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:38 am
I noticed that there were solder joints just above and below the mosfets, and tracked the circuits on the board and did some measuring. And with my limited knowledge in electronics my conclusion was that connecting these solder joints would bypass the mosfets, feeding the disks constantly with 12 and 5v.
So i just soldered them together and the disks were fully functional again!
Attached is a photo where i did the soldering. IIRC the upper circles is 12v and the lower ones is 5v.
Thanks for sharing the solution for your board, nice job diagnosing it! Based on the picture it looks like the points you found were a resistor in parallel with the mosfet (I think the label is R##?). End result would be the same, bypassing the mosfet.
No problem and thank you! No there were no resistors, just empty solder pads like it was prepared for a resistor. I think the label was B##?? My conclusion was that the left pad was input voltage to the mosfet and the right pad was switched output voltage to the HDD. So it seemed like it was prepared to bypass the mosfets.
I think the only purpose of them is to shut down disks when not in use. Maybe also to start the disks sequentially to avoid high start up currents.
Bypassing the mosfets will of course make them spin constantly.
Again I have very limited knowledge in electronics, I'm only guessing
Massive thanks to both of you on this, I own a TS-451A too and both bays 3 & 4 power dropping has cost me a lot of money simply because its normally safe to assume its drives that are failing, so you purchase new drives (upgraded too) and then you find the same errors occurring. In my case bay 3 can spin up times but soon after (mins/hours) will start to click and lose power eventually, bay 4 will do similar things but far more intermittent over many hours.
It's been a expensive nightmare but knowing that I am not alone has been music to my ears, more important is the great work you have done - I will take a look at my backplane next and report back.
I'd consider changing the mosfets but if there is an inherent issue with then overheating etc then maybe the bypass solder jumper is better.
I'm using a TS-831X with 8x8Tb in RAID6 and had 2 bays failing. The disks tried to spinup and failed, over and over again producing the 'clicking' as described in this thread. Sometimes, the NAS did boot correct and started rebuilding, but always failed eventually.
After testing both disks multiple times on different systems without any issues, i desperately bought new 8tb hdd's to be able to have the NAS working again. But my worst fear came true, the same unreliable behavior occurred again. Looking for similar experiences this thread showed up. And i'm glad it did!
Reading about the dysfunctional backplanes, and QNAP not replacing them within acceptable price-range made me quite disappointed.
As at least one user mentioned, simply cooling the unit made the issues disappear. So, i first tried just manually setting the fan to max speed. It's a bit noisy but, huh, the NAS seems stable?! Rebuilding finished successfully and in an attempt to tune down the noise i turned on the 'Smart Fan' automatic fan adjust again. Set manually to the minimum possible thresholds, low speed at 35°C and high speed at 45°C. Within half an hour, both disks failed again!
Now, i simply placed heat-sinks on all MOSFET's, and the system is running fine for days now, with the automatic fan speed turned on.
Rebuilding without issues, and both the old HDD's and new (but ofcourse..) HDD's passing all tests without issues.
Assuming the MOSFET's will fail eventually, it feels great to know i can still bypass them completely when needed.
I really wanted to share this experience since it has been quite a hit on our workflow and my wallet.
I can't thank the community enough, especially the users who tracked down the actual issue with the failing MOSFET's which are responsible for the HDD's power management.
And for any QNAP employees / developers reading this, it would be nice to be able to adjust the automatic fan thresholds to lower values.
A minimum of 35°C for low fan speed and 45°C for high doesn't make sense, at least the ability to set it lower would be nice. And could probably expand the lifetime for a lot of your sold products.
chripopper wrote: ↑Sun Feb 16, 2020 7:38 am
I noticed that there were solder joints just above and below the mosfets, and tracked the circuits on the board and did some measuring. And with my limited knowledge in electronics my conclusion was that connecting these solder joints would bypass the mosfets, feeding the disks constantly with 12 and 5v.
So i just soldered them together and the disks were fully functional again!
Attached is a photo where i did the soldering. IIRC the upper circles is 12v and the lower ones is 5v.
I just wanted to throw it out here, if it can help somebody else please let me know!
Of course this is at your own risk and only as a last resort. Always consider RMA in first hand.
By the way this is my last qnap device ever. I really liked it until this happened and i noticed how common this problem was over various model ranges. I think the sata controller board would be the the part thats least prone to failiure.
hi...i have a similar nas and similar issue...do you a picture of the "finished" product of the solder joints that you made? i am not so confident on electronics but a picture could help explain what needs to be done to a hired technician . thanks much
Just wanted to add myself to this very long list of QNAP NAS failures. I have a TS-231 2 bay unit which I purchased in June 2016 that has now failed. It keeps dropping the 2nd drive. I have tried lots of different brands and sizes of drives but the problem is the same. It's not even specific to the second port as it will work fine with 1 drive plugged into either bay.
Contacted QNAP who confirmed it was out of warranty and want $90 + shipping for a repair, it's not worth it considering the unit itself didn't cost much more than this. They diagnosed it as a backplane failure so I asked if I could just but this part and fit it myself but they refused.
serpentello wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2020 11:03 pm
Hi everybody!
I would like to thank everyone! Because of this forum I feel a bit less lost in this valley of tears.
My tvs-873 ran in the same problem.
I had an episode some month ago that was somehow solved taking out and back in the hard drives. But this time seems worst.
To recover the data I unmounted the nas and and following your advices I'm giving external power to the Hard Drives and everything is working now. Thank you!!!
I sent the log to Qnap Support and they confirmed it's a backplane issue and they ask 590$ to repair (or replace, who knows?!?) the nas. A bit too much.
So I ordered 6 new mosfets and I'll try to replace them in a laboratory. If that will not work I'll try to bypass them.
My question is.
What functions I will loose bypassing them?
If they are there they must have a function I guess.
Hi Serpentello - did you ever manage to fix the issue by replacing the 6 mosfets? Or did you use the bypass method?
I'm running into the exact same issue - again. Also with a TVS-873.
Just wanted to report in that this has now occurred on my TVS-463 (I have been running with HDD 3 unplugged for about two weeks and am just getting into the challenge this will be to resolve. Well past warranty date...
TS-431 with disk 4 going offline. I'm trying the fan method for now. My eyes aren't good enough and my soldering iron not small enough to try to fix it myself.
If you've been having the symptoms mentioned in this thread when...
...doing a rebuild after having replaced a failed disk AND...
...a WD Red WD20EFAX, WD30EFAX, WD40EFAX or WD60EFAX was used as the replacement disk AND...
...Qnap support have not confirmed that your NAS is suffering from a backplane fault THEN...[/list]
...your disk backplane may not be faulty but that instead you've been hit by this terrible move by WD.
I haven't seen anybody confirm RAID rebuild problems with the above mentioned disks in a Qnap yet but it is a possibility as there are reports of that happening in NASes from other manufacturers running different software.
Please note that the issue I bring up here apply only to the above mentioned WD Red models (and a few other non-NAS disk models). So if the disk you used as replacement is some other WD Red disk than the 4 exact models mentioned above, a backplane issue is still more probable.
RAID have never ever been a replacement for backups. Without backups on a different system (preferably placed at another site), you will eventually lose data!
A non-RAID configuration (including RAID 0, which isn't really RAID) with a backup on a separate media protects your data far better than any RAID-volume without backup.
All data storage consists of both the primary storage and the backups. It's your money and your data, spend the storage budget wisely or pay with your data!
Ok, I have the drives working again, by increasing the fan speed to medium. But to get there involved total data loss on disks 3 & 4, with 2 being unknown at this stage. Disk 1 data survived a factory reset and format (ha! nothing was formatted, no matter what QTS said.) Disk 1 is back to normal, but I'm going to start a new topic now to get help creating volumes...
Reporting in with my TS-431P disk 4 unplugged issues. It can go on for months without any issues and suddenly in the middle of the night the NAS reporting Disk 4 unplugged. Removing and plugging the drive back will get the disk detected and the RAID will start to rebuild.
Other times it fails within days of previous errors. Very random duration between fails.
My TVS-873 (bought in 2017) finally gave up completely on bays 3, 4, and 5.
After some back and forth haggling with QNAP support, my NAS now is at QNAP for repair ($590).
Even though QNAP claims that this is not a "known issue", they do have a test procedure.
Support stated that there isa 90% chance they'd send me a new one.
Since I also have the problem with my QNAP TVS-473 with the backplane. I want to know from someone. Runs the board without problems since you did the own repair?
Because QNAP wants to have 480 $ for the replacement and other spare parts shops Where I asked for backplane, say that QNAP does not give the backplanes to them anymore. Now I know why. A nice strategy to make money.
. thanks much