Link Station shuts down early morning on its own

[MajorHavoc]

OK, its an older device but it still serves me well. Well, almost.

I have a Link Station LS-QL4E2 F/W 1.11. In the Maintenance->PowerManagement section, all Usage Windows are set to Disable.

I receive regular status updates after a Raid Check, and all report zero errors. All the settings are set to NOT shutdown on errors.

However, every morning when I come to my office, the unit is off. If I wait and turn it on at 11 PM at night, it is still off in the morning. If I turn it on at 7 AM, it runs all day and night just fine, but is off in the morning. Which means I do not suspect the new power supply I am using, since the shut down is ALWAYS some time in the early morning regardless of how many hours the drive is running before the shutdown. (A power supply problem would show its ugly head more randomly.)

My guess is that regardless of the settings in the PowerManagement screen, some shutdown parameter is still lodged somewhere in this drives firmware.

How do I stop this drive from shutting down? I will even settle for making it start-up again at a specific time, but the power management screens settings seem to make little difference on anything, enabled or disabled.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you

[joma90]

That is kind of weird. You can check in the back of the unit to make sure the top switch is set to manual. If you have that set to auto and you have a pc with nas navigator installed. The unit will turn off when it no longer detects the computers with nas navigator.

just a though. If not what is your firmware version. If anything we can install a new fresh copy on there to see if the OS was the issue. This wont delete your data.

[MajorHavoc]

Thanks for the response. Weird is correct.

The switch is on manual, double checked just to be sure. And the navigator is NOT running on the PC, which is on all the time.

SIGH! 

I did put the firmware version in the post, but its not obvious. This unit latest is v1.11, and it is up to date.

Im willing to try a new install of the same OS. Can you point me to the proper place?

Thanks

[MajorHavoc]

So just for kicks, I tried adding a start and stop time. No change. The unit will not turn back on.

Maybe I misunderstand the schedule? I have seen messages that say the info is backwards. Is this true?

Any help? Hello Buffalo, can you help here please?

Maybe time to go buy a Synology drive and drop Buffalo. I know this unit is not new, but a lack of support is a lack of support.

Not a happy camper.

[joma90]

Wanting a fast reply for anything you should call buffalo then. Here are the steps. go to this link and find were it says newer models. Follow the steps.
http://m1econsulting.com/knowledge-base/force-update-buffalo-linkstation-nas/

You dont have to download nas navigator it you already have it. you just need to download your current firmware for the  unit.

[MajorHavoc]

Thanks Joma.  I have been told to look here. Supposedly, they respond here, but I guess not very often.

I appreciate your help. Thank you.

Update:

Went to that page, scrolled down as directed, and clicked the link there for getting the firmware.

This was the link: http://www.buffalotech.com/support/getfile/nasnavi-243wr.zip

Sadly, this was the result:

"The page you are looking for was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly."

Seems their site is outdated or has bad links, or the download no longer exists. I will do a Google search and see what I can find.

Cheers

[joma90]

That link is super old. Here is the newest link.

http://buffalotech.com/support-and-downloads/download/nasnavi-274.zip

[MajorHavoc]

No change. The unit is still powering off in the middle of the night sometime.

[peterke057]

I have the same issue with my LS-Q4.0TL. Contacted support only to be told it is out of warranty, as it is from 2009. Crappy support. I will get a new NAS from a different company. 

[MajorHavoc]

So I finally got the problem to go away by completely filling up the schedule, and then deleting them again. It seems that the last one's "off" setting gets stuck for some reason. Not sure why this helped, but it did work for me. Took two tries BTW.

Good luck.

[Eastmarch]

I have the same issue with my LS-Q4.0TL. Contacted support only to be told it is out of warranty, as it is from 2009. Crappy support. I will get a new NAS from a different company. 

No one works on out-of-warranty units for free any more, I'm afraid. (especially 7 years later) For better or for worse, this is how technical support works in the US for pretty much every hardware manufacturer. 

http://www.buffalotech.com/support-and-downloads/warranty-and-rma#get-support

Lays out what we provide. If long-term out of warranty support is a priority for you, many of the units in the TeraStation line get lifetime best effort through email/chat.

Both of you might have issues with a marginal hard drive. It really is the most likely reason a new behavior would crop up on the unit without being changed. The LS-Q predates my time at Buffalo, but I don't think MajorHavoc's trick of filling the schedule and deleting the schedule is a permanent fix.

If it was my unit, I'd make a backup first and foremost if I didn't have one already, and then I'd shut the unit down and test each drive individually using a drive testing tool like Crystal Disk Info. You would have to have a SATA->USB converter if you didn't want to open up a desktop unit to do it. Replace any drives showing 'Caution'.

If your hard drives have lasted 7 years, congratulations! This is well past their expected lifespan. Hard drives really are the 'achilles heel' of all storage; they don't last a very long time at all, they are too exquisitely engineered to last much over 5 years (and this is the expected lifespan of a top-quality enterprise-class drive). This is not going to get better in the near future; on the contrary, in order to pack 8+ Terabytes of data onto a drive using the same physical real estate as was being used in 1988, tolerances have gotten much, much smaller. (that first 1 inch x 3.5 inch drive stored 40 megabytes, 200,000 times fewer readable locations than a modern 8TB drive, and does it for a tiny fraction of the cost)

It's tough to let an old friend go, but if you don't want to do individual drive replacements, it may be time for a new NAS.  I think that the value proposition on a Buffalo considering what you get for the money is an excellent choice, but maybe I'm biased :)