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Forgive me if this question has been asked before, I've done a quick search and didn't find any answers relevant to my issue.

I picked up a very cheap but faulty NAS off eBay for pretty much the cost of postage, the fault was the unit was dead apart from the cooling fan. When it arrived and powered up the fan was running and the power light underneath close to the 12v input jack was running so I proceeded to strip the unit down until I just had the main board which I powered up. The power LED was lit and nothing else apart from a high pitched squeal which varied for a few seconds and stopped. It did this every time power was applied and sounded like a switch mode PSU under stress. A close look around the PCB revealed a capacitor C271 that looked a little browner than the others and what looked like flux surrounding it. I removed this and it was dead short and further checks told me it was on the supply rail. I've not replaced it as yet, I figured there would be many others dotted around the place anyway.

With the fault cleared, the NAS now fired up with no HDD's fitted, the blue LED flashing for a short while before coming on full time.

Now my questions start here:- I do not have any 3.5" HDD's to hand, but I had a 512Gb 2.5" SDD with data on it. This was plugged into HDD pos 1 and the NAS fired back up. This time the function LED after the Blue LED finished doing its business was lit. Reading the manual and a post elsewhere, the advice given was to do a full reset which I have yet to do. I do have at hand a couple of USB 3.0 external HDD's, a 500 and a 750Gb, now can I plug one of these into the rear USB socket without any internal 3.5" HDD's fitted and use the NAS like this for testing, or do I have to have internal drives fitted before I can, also, again for testing, will the 2.5" SSD be fine plugged into pos 1?

All of my spare HDD's are 2.5" and I am a little reluctant to go out and buy a 3.5" drive if there are other possible issues.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

If the light turned solid I would check to see it joined the network, might have booted into EM mode via onboard NAND.

This device won't boot from USB but you could try booting it into EM mode via TFTP if nothing else.

Thanks for the reply,
                              I wasn't actually trying to 'boot' via USB, I was asking if the NAS would recognise an SSD plugged into the USB socket without actually having a physical drive fitted internally for it to function as a NAS? I did plug a 2.5" SSD inside in position 1 and all this did was to bring up a red LED. I did manage in the early hours of this morning to install the NAS software and when I did a scan, it appeared to 'find' the NAS but the icon had a big question mark on it, there was the word 'emergency' below the icon with the question mark. Thats as far as I've managed to get so far before I fell asleep. My main question is really, will the NAS work as a NAS with an external drive fitted and no internal drives fitted? Unfortunately, my total experience of NAS systems is a big zero, I understand the basics but that's about it.

TIA

Quote from: Jomac on April 25, 2022, 08:18:02 AMMy main question is really, will the NAS work as a NAS with an external drive fitted and no internal drives fitted?

No, it needs an internal HDD.