QNAP 451 Problems

fizzy · 14 Jan 2019 at 03:19

Hi All,

Not sure this is the right section - but I'm having issues with my QNAP 451 nas, and believe it's a board failure.

It started beeping and alerting on fan failure, even though fan appeared to be working fine. Shut it down and proceeded to change the fan for a known good noctua pwm fan. Started back up and same issue - although now front lights were in a weird state - status light off, usb light on and all hdd lights red.

Seemed to take a long time to load up and when it did it reported a volume had failed as two drives were missing. Appears wasn't picking up drives in bay 3 and 4.

Put a different disk in and did a factory reset - went through the setup procedure and came up, but lights the same. When checking in the control panel is showed fan rpm at some ridiculously high figure (with a cross by it) and system temp at 0c (which is apparently ok/green tick).

Tried a firmware reflash - same result. Even tried an earlier version just in case it was a firmware issue.

Drives tested out fine on PC. Put original fan back in.

Hooked it up to my monitor and went into bios. Got current health readings :-

CPU Temp - +255c
V_Core - +2.04v
V_3.3 - +6.800v
VCC3V - +4.080v
VSB3V - +4.080v
VBAT - +4.080v
V_5 - +10.200v
V_12 - +24.480v

They did flicker to lower values occasionally. I believe this is just bad readings since if it was producing double the voltage on 5 and 12v it would have fried everything, and cpu was only warm to the touch when checked. Not that I could do anyway since power brick just supplies 12v to the nas and the rest is done internally.

So basically - it's kinda working in that it powers up and loads the system, but gives warnings on fan, lights on on front and bays 3 and 4 don't work. No longer in warranty and no easy parts to fix so basically it's had it I think.

I bought a nas as a neat all in one compact solution but it's been a bit of a pain to be honest, at least with this one. Wonder if Synology are any better?

Sorry for the ranty nature of this post - spent the weekend making sure data was secure (backing up my backups

) and have just ordered parts to make a freenas box. Hopefully that will last a bit longer.

deuse · 14 Jan 2019 at 05:52

Is it still under warranty?

And ask Qnap for help via the app. They should come back to you in a day or so.

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tuto...esk-app-to-solve-issues-and-provide-feedback/

fizzy · 14 Jan 2019 at 09:35

deuse said:
Is it still under warranty?

And ask Qnap for help via the app. They should come back to you in a day or so.

https://www.qnap.com/en/how-to/tuto...esk-app-to-solve-issues-and-provide-feedback/

Out of warranty unfortunately.

Jamie Cruickshank · 7 Dec 2019 at 03:29

I am very sorry to bring up an old post. However I just wanted to let anyone know who reads this what this issue is.
I stumbled across this post when I was trying to diagnose my fault but I eventually figured it out.

I had the QNAP TS-253 Pro with the same Intel J9100 CPU. This CPU was actually part of a faulty batch of CPUs from Intel that had a faulty LPC Bus.
The LPC bus is what the Fintek F71869A Super I/O + Hardware Monitor Chip talks to the CPU. Which monitors the Temperatures ETC.

Here is what this Wiki Article states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvermont#Erratum

The LPC, USB and SD Card buses circuitry degradation issues also apply to other Bay Trail processors such as Intel Celeron J1900 and N2800/N2900 series;[21] also to Pentium N3500, J2850, J2900 series; and Celeron J1800 and J1750 series -- as those are based on the same affected silicon.

I know this doesnt help you OP now but I hope it clears it up for anyone else searching.

fizzy · 7 Dec 2019 at 11:39

Interesting - thanks. So it was doomed from the start.

Shame the CPU can't be swapped out but it's soldered directly to the board. Don't know whether that would cause bays 3 and 4 to fail as well, but if the sensors were sorted at least it would work ok with just bays 1 & 2. As it is I still have it but it's stored away for spares, although all I'll probably end up using out of it is the power pack and memory.

Rocket Surgeon · 9 Feb 2020 at 00:50

Thanks from me too, my TS-451 did exactly the same thing Jan 2020, QNAP support suggested that the Intel CPU hardware fault would have caused the failure much earlier and its something else they can fix for USD$150 if I ship the unit to them.

I think its time for a new NAS.

fizzy · 1 Mar 2020 at 12:53

Dug mine out for a play after seeing a video about a resistor fix on another make of nas of similar spec. Can't see an equivalent fix for the qnap though. I think the theory is that there's an internal diode on the cpu that fails for one of the clock lines, so a pull up resistor is used to recover it. Seems issues are appearing with later varients of the cpu too - so if getting a newer nas I would have avoided intel celeron chips and maybe gone for something with either a higher spec cpu, or alternative make like an arm.

At the moment my TS-451 is up and running with bays 3 and 4 not working (drives don't even spin up) and the hardware monitor readings all over the place. Takes an age to boot up as well. So not actively using it.

Currently using a mITX pc with freenas.

I also have a WD "My Cloud" 2 bay mini nas for simple nas work and backups, and that's decided to report any drive I put in bay 2 as "bad", even though works fine in bay 1. That's using an Arm cpu though so it's likely a board issue.

Time to look into non disk based back up solutions I think, although high capacity LTO drives are expensive.