A week or so back I received an alert email from my QNAP telling me the fan had failed so I downed it remotely. When I attempted to restart it it did not boot.
I eventually replaced the fan as I read that if it is not reporting correctly, the QNAP will not pass its preboot test.
I replaced the original, a Y.S Tech Xtreme BD121232LB with a WDERAIR 120mm x 32mm Dual Ball 4Pin DC Computer Centrifugal Blower Fan 12V PWM Big Airflow. On paper it was a like for like, but ran a bit faster.
Replacing the fan did not help, I get 4 red drive lights, the USB light is hard on blue and the power light never comes on, so again not passing the preboot.
Of course this could mean the mainboard got cooked, but wondering if anyone has any thoughts as to what elase it could be? Is the QNAP very fussy about how the PWM fan reports speed etc and and needs something more identical to the original?
That is a long thread so I will go back and read it, but looks really interesting. So potentially it is a clock error and not related to the fan at all…and fixed by a 100ohm res?
Thanks for the insight guys, serves me right for going to ChatGPT for troubleshooting and not researching the forum as I used to. I was thrown by the initial fan error and went down a rabbit hole from there. Will apply the resistor fix and see how i go, but seems to be a common problem.
Noted thank you. And given I do have a replacement, is it worth replacing the 10 year old fan anyway, or just return it. Maybe keep it as a spare…do the fans actually ever fail?
Thats true, although given the PWM controls cannot kick in this one spins faster at max speed and is defintely louder. I’ll see how it sounds when I can slow it down a bit.
And probably not the worst thing in the world to have a spare on hand.
Just did the resistor fix. The no-solder jumper trick doesn’t work on the mini, the connecter is too small so you need the correct connector kit. I got an unnecessarily large kit of PB1.25 connectors that had jumper wires and pre-crimped cable ends, and used those for the resistor. It took 10x as long to research the solution and find/order the parts than it did to make the repair.
My only regret is one of the case screws was underneath a stupid sticker so I broke the case housing plastic trying to get the case off. There is a nicely readable and obvious standard for sticker design to say “screw is under this sticker and removing it voids your warranty”, and QNAP didn’t use that standard, so my case is broken now. Other than that it wasn’t too hard.
Oh yea I also replaced the fan with a much louder one but the noise was fixed by changing the fan speed from always on high to auto, and now it’s about as loud as the original fan was at full speed. I was also worried about messing up the cpu heatsink putty but I guess it matched back up ok since cpu temps don’t seem to be spiking too high, reporting about 45C with the case still partially disassembled and running a simultaneous virus scan and raid scrub to get cpu load up over 90%. So far so good.