I bought a Dlink DNS-323 at the end of December 2008, installing the latest firmware version 1.06 from the start. My husband set it up to do RAID and we ran it fine for about two weeks; we manually were backing up both Macs and PCs in our house. We didn't use any of the server functions (web, Itunes, etc.) though they were enabled....hoping to use them in the future.
One day it was unavailable on the network and both drive lights were pink. Rebooting it fixes the problem for about 15 minutes, during which time the drives are spinning constantly, and the light is blue. After 15 minutes it stops working on the network again, the lights turn pink, and the drives go quiet. We've kept it turned off most of the time since then, except to get data off it once in awhile.
I finally got around to logging into it today and investigating the problem. The server said the RAID had an error which suggested it was out of sync (I can't remember the exact wording now.) When I looked on this forum for help with that error, another person with the same error was told to "manually rebuild" the RAID, so I tried that. When it tries to "rebuild" it runs for about 30 minutes and then the disks spin down and it sits there idle, pink, and not making any progress. The message under RAID Configuration says: The RAID volume is synchronizing now. Please wait for 15479.6 minute(s). (Sometimes the number changes, but not often...)
I disabled the Power Management as I was afraid that was the cause of the drives shutting down while trying to sync. I've tried this syncing three times and each time it only runs for about 30 minutes before going idle. The temperature is also high, I think, right now 109F. Reading in this forum further I found some concerns about the fan not working with this newest firmware version.
Investigating further, the fan is definitely "intermittent" at best...it is usually not on....I think perhaps my fan is malfunctioning and now the two brand new Western Digital 1 terabyte drives have simply overheated and are now damaged.
At this point I've set up a USB drive and I'm copying off the data from the D-Link. If I do this in 15 minute segments it seems to work ok, shutting down the NAS and letting it cool down before doing another 15 minutes. This is a slow and unpleasant process.
Questions:
- how do I test the drives to see if they are indeed damaged? Should I simply format them to work on my PC an run some diagnostics, or is there something in the DLINK that can test them for me?
- is downgrading the firmware the solution to the fan problem, or is it simply malfunctioning? Is there a way to tell definitively?
- is there anything more should I do before giving up and sending this machine back to DLINK?
Thanks in advance for advice.
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Topic: System Freezes - both disk lights are pink (Read 3728 times)