All the "magic smoke" escaped from my NAS...

[DanielCoffey]

I have been enjoying my little NAS for the past four years and yesterday it unexpectedly died, losing a little of the "magic smoke" in the process.

 

I noticed stuttering yesterday afternoon when my AppleTV requested a bluray which needed transcoding so I was investigating using the Plex Optimize feature when the connection to the server dropped. I went into the spare room and looked and the power light was off. There was an unwelcome "hot plastic" smell in the room. Flicking the power switch just resulted in a "ping" noise from the PSU. Ah well, time to open it up...

 

Pulling ALL leads from the PSU and only attaching the 24-pin motherboard cable with that trick jumper you can get to fool it into thinking it is connected showed immediately that the PSU was dead. Each time it was switched on I just got the "ping" noise and no PSU fan movement. Fortunately it is still under warranty. I suspect an internal fuse is blown.

 

Next I got out a spare PSU and tested it with the same cable and jumper... worked perfectly as expected. I plugged it into the motherboard via the 24-pin and aux power leads but left everything else off. Ping and shutdown. Unplugged the aux power lead and got a flick of fans for half a second before a ping and shutdown.

 

I pulled the motherboard out and took off the CPU cooler. The TIM showed some suspicious brown at one edge. Evidence of high heat I wonder? No evidence of burning under the CPU however and a visual of the motherboard looks fine to me.

 

Assuming the CPU has fried, I have no idea if the motherboard is OK or not as I don't have a spare processor to test it with. If the PSU was taken out too, I would not really be able to trust the motherboard any more.

 

This is a bit of a shame as the CPU and motherboard are one full year out of their warranties. The PSU is still covered although at four years I would only expect a "return and repair" which is fair enough.

 

Time to go shopping I think. Legacy Haswell stuff is too expensive for its age so it is time to enter the Century of the Fruitbat. Mini-ITX board, a small Coffee Lake CPU and some DDR4 RAM should do nicely. As it is simply a domestic NAS for serving movies to a single viewer, I don't feel ECC and a server board are really necessary.

 

RIP Haswell i3.