I think I have a dying NAS on my hands and after reaching out to QNAP and finding that the NAS is EOL and they have no parts for “out of warranty repairs” I decided to see if you all have any ideas.
After turning the NAS on from a cold start, after a couple of minutes of successful operation, the slot will intermittently drop any mechanical hard drive either by completely not detecting a drive that was in the bay (no red or green activity) lights or flagging disk I/O errors. No such errors occur when I put a 2.5" SSD in the slot which leads me to believe that the electronics powering the slot are heat and/or load sensitive because the SSD draws considerably less power than does a mechanical drive which allows the slot to continue to function.
This sounds suspiciously like the power MOSFET issue that I experienced in an old TS-879 PRO that I had and was able to get going by successfully jumpering around the MOSFET effectively applying power to the slot all the time.
As I really dislike throwing equipment away that is potentially fixable, I wonder if anyone has had any experience with trying to keep a TS-831X alive and, if so, do you know if the back plane electronics are the same as in the TS-831X or are you aware of any source of repair parts for these machines?
The old forum had a large topic about these issues and I seem to remember x31 units being part of it.
I remember the easy solution was to bridge out the mosfet to bring back stable power, but I do not have screenshots to point you to the right one (a fine tipped multimeter should find it for you)
Yes, there was a lot of good stuff in the old forum that never made it across. I may have pictures of the TS-879 I bridged to restore stable power to the offending slot.
Unfortunately, however, I no longer have the eyesight of the steady hands of a surgeon that I remember was a necessary part of the skill set.
If I find the pictures I took, I’ll keep them just in case anyone else may need them in the future.
I found a couple of pictures. The “after repair” pic is pretty bad. I’ll take this box apart and see if I find the same parts inside.
One final bit of information on this sort of repair where a single slots goes bad on a NAS such as the TS-831X, the TS-879 series or even the old venerable TS-459 Pro series.
Yes, if you’ve got the skill and dexterity to jumper across the MOSFET itself, that will work. However, I found a solution on the internet that is equally effective but requires much less skill to accomplish bypassing the MOSFET. On either side of the MOSFET you will find two sets of tinned pads (one set is drawn through with the red circle above) without holes seeming connected to nothing. If you bridge the two pads with a ball of solder you will accomplish the same thing. This leads me to believe that the design engineers either knew that these MOSFETs may be an issue in the future and provided a non-published solution as a workaround or… Honestly, I can’t think of another reason for putting those pads on the circuit board.
The pads indicated have what looks like an inductor symbol between them. I think the pads are used when an inductor, or inductors, is/are required. No through-holes means surface-mount devices only.
If the pads were designed for solder bridging, they would be closer together - without a silkscreen symbol in the way.
