RESOLVED: Goodbye TS5800 ... Hello TS5810 ! (... and a question)

[Zebraitis]

Hi folks,

Many many (many!) years ago I picked up a TS5800 that was said not to work for $100.  I brought it back to life by reloading firmware, added some drives and began my experience with the TerraStation product.

I'm a home user that needed a backup solution for a home server.  And, at last count, I had 8 drives that had 68TB in that TS5800, WAY exceeding my expectations and Buffalo's likely recommendations.

This thing has been dragged from home to home, on many trips inside an RV bouncing around, and always delivered.

Until today.

Powered up, expected things to spin up, but the mapped drive in Win11 was giving errors, and on checking NAS Navigator it showed that the drives were unformatted. 

Going down to the home office, I could smell that acrid burnt electronics smell.   :o  The TS5800 was trying it's best to come alive, but looks like it's mortally wounded.

Realizing I would need a new one, I turned to eBay.  The used TS5800's were around $250 and looking mighty worse for wear.

HOWEVER...  there was a shiny 5810 with no drives in it that I was able to pick up for $310.

From what I can tell, the TS 5810 has a faster processor, twice the RAM, 10GB ethernet, and runs at 6BG/s rather than 3GB/s.

This could have been the TS5800's way of telling me that it was time for an upgrade.    :) 

MY QUESTION:

is the 5810 capable of loading the needed boot software on an unformatted drive, or is there some voodoo that I need to do to load that?

Thanks!

[1000001101000]

It should boot from the NAND by default giving you the usual web interface to complete the format/install.

voodoo is only needed if the nand is corrupt or something

[Zebraitis]

Thanks, that's reassuring!

I'll test my 8 drives while I'm waiting for the 8510 to show up... and I'll post my results of installing them into the 5810 and if this will be sans-voodoo.

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Comment #1 - Just about finished cleaning up the 8 SATA drives and removing the volumes.  I was surprised that when I connected the drive to the Win11 box that I could easily delete the volume on the TS formatted drives without using some sort of third-party disk partition utility.

Win11 Disk Management did the job, and then I did a quick check of S.M.A.R.T. status using CrystalDiskInfo.  All looks good so far.

[Zebraitis]

OK... for those of you that like closure, an update:

I was able to get my home NAS backed up successfully.  All formatted drives and trays from my previous TS5800 were able to be added to the TS5810 and a new JBOD config in RAID 0 was created.  My backup of the home NAS server is complete, and as I mentioned in a different post the throughput from the Windows 11 box to the TS5810 was at a speed of 2GB over the wire.

A discovery:  the acrid smell that I mentioned above in my first post was actually the plug end of the power cable going to my old TS5800 !!!   I was using that same cable to power the new TS5810.  Power was arcing from the metal of the plug to the wire inside the plug and all worked... but once all the drives were spinning and the TS5810 started pulling more power the plug head again began melting.  Crazy, but I am glad I caught it before it developed into a fire.  It actually softened the case of the APC UPS. 

As a result of this discovery, I bought a couple of cheap 2TB drives and I will see if the TS5800 will still work.  If so, that will be a cheap craigslist NAS deal for somebody here in Denver.

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An annoyance:  Buffalo no longer bothers to drill holes in the bottom of the new trays and decided that holes on the side of the tray would work fine...  They don't.  I plan to put a separate post about that as a complaint.