NASLite Network Attached Storage

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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 8:21 am 
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Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:05 am
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Hello

My NAS has been functioning perfectly for months on end, but on Wednesday I brought my NAS to a friend, kept it running until yesterday and brought it back home. To my disappointment I could only find 3 out of four HDDs.

In the syslog I am not getting any S.M.A.R.T messages, but I am getting this:

# Jun 10 14:05:48 user.warn kernel: ata3 is slow to respond, please be patient
# Jun 10 14:05:48 user.err kernel: ata3 failed to respond (30 secs)

Should I leave my NAS online, to see if the problem corrects itself, or should I turn it off until I get the problem solved?

P.S: I got all the drives up and running on one reboot, and the data was still there. But after about an hour of uptime the machine froze.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 8:27 am 
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Check cables and run diags on your drives. Also make sure that your power supply is not underpowered and the drives and CPU get proper cooling.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 8:47 am 
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Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:05 am
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One thing I forgot to mention is that I am using a Promise SATA 300 TX4 4P controller. And the PSU I am using is 460 Watts so I doubt that the power is insufficient to run 4 hard drives and a 166MHz processor with 256MB ram.

One thing I did notice though, when I booted up was that the CPU fan had a little trouble starting up, but with a _little_ finger help for the CPU fan it started spinning again. The cabinet has two 80mm fans, one blowing air on the hard drives and one in the back blowing the air out of the cabinet

But I am still getting the same error message about ata3 being slow to respond.


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 12:34 pm 
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Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:05 am
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After more fiddling with the NAS, including putting in a graphics card so that I could add a monitor + keyboard to diagnose the problem, I am tempted to blame the S-ATA controller itself. The bootup starts, finds the memory ok and my cdrom, but on the next screen I am getting : "Warning - the bios does not find proper hardware configuration, please check your system again!"

Another suspect I had was the Motherboard, but alas, this is probably not the case. I tried to connect the S-ATA controller to another Motherboard, and I got the exact same thing there.

One last thing to note: after about two minutes the message dissappears and it finds three out of four hard drives and Naslite-2 starts booting.

So do you think that my eight month old S-ATA controller is about to die or am I doing something wrong?


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PostPosted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 6:46 pm 
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Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:22 am
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Swap the data connectors for drives 3 & 4 - if the error message changes to reflect the new configuration, the problem is the drive, if it remains constant, the problem is the controller.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 10:08 am 
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Joined: Tue Oct 03, 2006 5:05 am
Posts: 7
Thanks for your help guys.

I tried interchanging the data connectors for 3 and 4, but I still got the same error message. Hopefully I will get a replacement card from the online shop i bought it from. As for the motherboard, it is getting to be a bit antiquated (Probably new in 1996 or earlier). The CPU cooler is about to die, and a replacement cooler will be a bit troublesome to find.

Therefore I think I will retire the old motherboard and purchase a brand new motherboard so that the NAS will be more reliable. And who knows, a new motherboard with new technology might require less power than the old one.


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