Issues and Workarounds

From NAS-4220

Contents 1 Turning off the NAS using the power button is not working 2 Spin-down Problem 3 Samsung HD501LJ & other Samsung HDDs of the Spinpoint T Series 4 Fan 5 Instability after large data transfers

Turning off the NAS using the power button is not working

Problem: It's not working turning off the NAS by using the power button.

Solution: Some devices are working not properly. In most cases you can fix this problem by making a factory reset which is a function in the webmenu of the NAS. If this might not solve the problem you have to exchange your device.

Spin-down Problem

Problem: The NAS will awake from the Spin-down periodically after 5 minutes if the Spin-Down time was set to a lower value than 5 minutes. If it was set to a higer value than 5 minutes the drives will never go into Spin-down mode.

Official Solution: At the moment there is none. Raidsonic is working at this time to get this solved. They provide to turn Spin-down off till this problem will be fixed. At the moment this can be done by setting the Spin-down time to a higer value than 5 minutes.

Unofficial Solution: Spindown will be done by the disks itself when the are configured correctly. The main goal is to reduce disk access to a minimum in standby situations. This can be done by stopping all unneeded tasks or by copying the required files to RAM-disk. The attached script does this for the basic part of the installation. It copies the codb-directory to RAM-disk, which is used by a cron-job running every 5 minutes. If other packages are installed, more work have to be done.

Installation:
1.) login as root (telnet or ssh)
2.) "vi /system/bugfixes" and enter the code
3.) "chmod 755 /system/bugfixes" to make the script executable
4.) "/system/bugfixes"

After a reboot: 
1.) login as root (telnet or ssh)
2.) "/system/bugfixes"

There may be a better place to store the script (eg. init-script on share "public") but it is very dangerous to run this script automatically (if you make something wrong).

Unofficial Spin-Down Fix

The Bonjour feature also detains the drives to stay in Spin-down mode. Unfortunately the above solution doesn't fix this problem. So Bonjour has to be disabled for the drives to stay in Spin-down mode.

Samsung HD501LJ & other Samsung HDDs of the Spinpoint T Series

Problem to recognize these harddisks

In some cases SATA 1.5Gb/s hosts can not establish SATA interface connection with SATA 3.0Gb/s devices due to interface protocol issues if you use two disks in the NAS-4220.

Solution

In this case the jumper may be installed as shown on the figure to force the device to negotiate for SATA 1.5 Gb/s speed.

If the disk is still not recognized at first boot, try rebooting the NAS. Usually a second boot will make the NAS see the disk. (Maybe the disk is not powered up in time for detection at first boot?)

Unfortunately this isn't the answer for all problems with these harddisks (for more info see Incompatible HDDs).

Fan

The build-in fan is very noisy on system start

The ICY BOX IB-NAS4220-B operates quietly and the smart fan is controlled by temperature which helps lower power consumption. The fan control in default is set to AUTO.

Solution

Check the jumper settings (jumpers J4 and J5) and refer to a table printed on the mainboard (see the photograph). The original 40 x 40 mm fan may also be replaced by an alternative fan with a 2 pin connector (e.g. Scythe Mini Kaze 40mm).

Instability after large data transfers

Lockups after large data transfers

Long running data transfers (eg 50-100GB + associated re-read for verification) may cause the box to refuse to respond to further requests (eg windows explorer/Samba, print requests, login to the admin screens via IP address on web browser). NB the data transfer usually completes, even though the box is not responding to new requests from any machine in the network.

Temperatures in the gap between the drives (near the power/data connectors) max out around 42C with both drives (250GB & 750GB) active, so initial suggestion is that this is not an overheating issue.

No data corruptions detected so far.

May be related to the "Turning off the NAS using the power button is not working" issue, above.

Solution

Sometimes the box will accept shutdown via the front-panel button. If not, then a hard power-cycle seems to be required (the back reboot button does not operate in this case).