Oh joy, my slightly ancient NAS has died. It’s had a tough life, initially discarded by a previous workplace it has sat in a data cabinet in my shed for about 8 years, sucking in all manner of dust and gunk. Occasionally I would feel guilty & give it a blast with compressed air to clear it out a little.
This time it looks like the PSU has carked it. After a bit of faffing about I had it cracked open and sure enough there was no power to the unit and at least one suspicious capacitor was visible once the PSU was inspected. I know from experience these things are a bugger to fix, so I cut off the cables close to the case and chucked it to the e-waste bin.
A quick search revealed that IF I could find a replacement then it would be silly expensive to ship to Australia.
A further search also unearthed some others who had fallen foul of this issue and managed to revive their NAS using a standard ATX power supply with a few tweaks. Being the thrifty fellow I am, I decided to go down that path and ordered myself a nice new ATX supply online.
So what are the steps to get the juice flowing to the NAS?
1. Take out the old dead PSU
2. Give everything a good clean
3. Cut the cables off the old PSU close to the case, you will need these
4. Bin the old PSU
5. Scrounge / order an ATX supply
6. Merge the old cable with that of the new PSU using this super helpful document
7. Slap it back together & see if it’s happy
Steps one to five were easy. Step six was a little more of a bodge job as we have recently moved and I could find neither soldering iron or heat gun. No fear, as any self respecting sparkie would, I used some single screw connectors to get the job done until a soldering device reveals itself as we unpack.
Add a bit of protective material for the cables where they sneak through the back of the NAS and we’re good to go. Note that I kept the original plug with the original cable configuration as I may need an ATX PSU for testing some time in the future. I’ll just pinch it off the NAS when that need arises.
Happily this worked a treat and I copied our precious files to my shiny new QNAP NAS. This good old NVX will now become a second backup so I know I have two copies of the important things in two different locations.