Don’t buy Maxtor Shared Storage II
Well the title of this post says it all really. Regular readers may remember my comments on protecting the digital home, regarding my efforts to find a NAS solution for my home Mac network. Ironically, my chosen solution did little to live up to the title of that blog post, because the Maxtor Shared Storage II drive I purchased didn’t protect me at all.
A few months after purchasing the device, and having made it the centrepoint of our network with all documents, music, video copied onto it (and getting iTunes, iPhoto etc to use it as the library), I did one of my not so regular backups on the USB drive. Immediately following the backup the NAS drive died. It was no longer accessible via any means and was blinking error codes on it’s LEDs. It couldn’t even be turned off by the power switch.
I called the Seagate tech support, located in the Philippines I believe, and was shocked by the absolutely pathetic level of support I received. After asking some fairly useless questions I was told “Oh the drive faulty. You have to replace it”. Ahh, ok, what about all my files? Surely there is something I can do besides give up? No was the answer. There was further discussion but it’s not worth repeating here. Let’s just say Seagate were of no help whatsoever.
So I kinda freaked out. Had I lost everything? I had files from personal web development projects, video and photos going back many years (including of my brand new daughter!). I couldn’t believe that was it, all gone, nothing I could do to rectify the situation. I later learned that many other people have had similar (or worse) problems with these drives and received equally little help from tech support.
The next thing I did was to check the backup I had just done. I plugged the USB drive into my laptop but it wouldn’t read it. I tried Windows and OSX. No go. (I later learned it uses an Ext3 filesystem which is why I couldn’t read the disk). Freaking out a lot now, what good is a backup if you can’t use it? The trick is that you are meant to restore the backup onto the same device, so I would have to buy another Maxtor NAS.
I went into action mode. I called Harris Technology where I bought the drive from and they suggested I would have to use a data recovery service to get my files back. Some of you may remember I asked for suggestions on LinkedIn. Got some quotes, looked like I’d have to pay anywhere from $700 to $1500 to recover the data, and there were no guarantees. But I had a hunch that if I replaced the Maxtor Shared Storage II under warranty I could just restore the backup and be OK. It would cost nothing if it worked, but if it didn’t I would lose the data on the NAS drive and not be able to recover it. (Remember at this stage I didn’t know if the backup was even any good)
I took a gamble and did the warranty return. This happened several weeks ago, and in the time since I had purchased it they had stopped making the 320GB Maxtor Shared Storage II. The closest replacement was the 1TB dual disk version. Luckily I talked to a great guy in HT’s tech support who gave me a cash refund because the 320GB was out of production, and I put this money towards the 1TB unit (which had dropped in price substantially since I went shopping for a NAS solution).
I took the 1TB device home, plugged in the USB drive and the backup restored without a problem. Awesome! I had all my data back and now had RAID 1 (eg data mirrored onto both disks) “protection” for only a few hundred dollars more than I originally spent.
The other day, however, the new device stopped working in an eerily similar manner to the first one. OMG how crap are Maxtor drives? Same story, couldn’t connect to it at all and couldn’t turn it off or reboot. When I called tech support about the first drive, they had told me to unplug it from the power, but that seemed to kill it completely (as it wouldn’t even turn on after that). So I didn’t do that this time, I just left it the way it was.
I was really pissed off by this time, because I had not done a backup from the 1TB drive yet. I had been busy with work and a new baby. So anything we had done since the new drive would be lost, including quite a few photos and many hours of edited video! And I might not be able to get any of this back. I called one data recovery place that had been recommended to me, Payam in North Sydney, and I talked things through with a really helpful guy whose name I can’t remember. He was great, plenty of answers and knowledge of these rubbish Maxtor drives. Additionally, they quoted a fee of $400 (if they could recover the data) and would do the work locally, as opposed to many data recovery companies who ship the disk interstate if not overseas. So I had one option.
My other option was to accept I had lost everything since the last backup, replace the 1TB drive under warranty and restore the backup. But when I did some research into problems with the drives (as I should have done in the first place) I found that they are a complete disaster. Take a look at the comments on Amazon and Crunch Gear. I agree with many of the commenters, I can’t believe they can get away with selling such shoddy products! It was also rather disheartening to read the Seagate Community Forums, where there are many tales of woe and sadness. Lots of problems, very few answers.
So I decided there and then that there is no way I am going to buy another Maxtor product ever again.
I rang Harris Technology again and explained all this. It must have been obvious from my tone that I was not going to accept another replacement. The same fatal problem had struck two different drives in almost as many weeks. So they said I should be able to get a cash refund under warranty, again. I could use this money to buy something decent this time.
My first course of action was to retrieve the backup. Having learnt that the backup drive was formatted as Linux Ext3, I set about finding a way to read that. I’m no Linux expert so I don’t have a spare machine sitting around for such an occasion. Some research uncovered some suggestions on how to read Ext3 under Mac OSX, but I had no luck with these methods. Windows being more popular, I thought I’d give that a try and came across ext2fsd, a software tool that would let me read the drive in Windows XP. And the terrific guys at Payam also suggested Knoppix, a Linux distribution that runs off a single CD, turning any computer into an instant Linux machine. I also found that I could run Ubuntu in Parallels on my Mac. Three solutions that would let me recover the backup files, with a bit of fiddling (OK quite a lot).
(Knoppix rocks by the way, dead easy to create, just download the CD image and burn it. It read the Ext3 drive no worries at all. And Ubuntu running in Parallels is also quite cool, but did have some issues with seeing the USB drive. I didn’t fancy the idea of ext2fsd but it actually turned out to be the easiest approach.)
As for my new storage solution, well I am now very wary of NAS—these consumer products are just not up to scratch and the Mac support in the Maxtor drive wasn’t great anyway. So I thought I’d get an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station which as well as giving me faster WiFi and better Mac-ness, would allow me to plugin any USB drive and make it a NAS device. To go with this I was going to get a LaCie d2 Quadra 320GB USB drive as these are recommended by Apple and have a great reputation. Or if I did want to buy another NAS device, I could get a LaCie Ethernet Disk mini. Either way, I would continue to use the Maxtor USB drive to backup.
You may notice I said I was going to do this. In preparation for returning the 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II device, I had to turn it off. First I thought I would unplug it from the network, as many people in the Community Forum were suggesting the problems stem not from the hard disks, but from the firmware and/or network interface. After doing this I unplugged the power. I then thought for laughs I would plug it back in and see what happens, after all it couldn’t get any worse. To my astonishment the drive booted, rejoined the network and was fully functional. I immediately ran a backup onto the USB drive!
I am now in quite a strange situation. Technically I can’t return it under warranty since it’s working, but I don’t trust it even as far as I could throw it (which wouldn’t be far). I guess I’ll do very regular backups and wait for it to fail again, which I can’t imagine will take very long. At least I have a new solution planned for when it does.
So at the end of the day, it’s been rather stressful, but possibly not as bad as it seemed. I would still recommend that you do not buy a Maxtor Shared Storage II, or any other Maxtor product. Besides the critical problems described here, I could also comment on other features of the device that I find less than optimal, such as the poor administrative interface and overheating issues, but I can live with those as long as the thing works properly.
I bet they call me up now and try to convince me they make good drives :) Ahh the power we wield in the blogosphere!
Update: my story continues…
Comments
I also had the same issues you faced, I went threw 4 devices before i said F it…I baught a Linlsys NAS Caddy Threw 2 500GB drives into it and went that rout, its been great so far 8 months with no issues where the MAXTOR was 4 in less than 2 months, and the best thing ablut the Linksys NAS is its built on NT so if the NAS Device Fails the data is still Descoverable…
Thanks for the tip Anthony! I looked at the Linksys product you mentioned, but thought Maxtor was more reputable. I’ve definitely changed my mind.
Maybe you should look into online backup, check out Mozy. Or maybe setup a RAID, that way if a drive fails you just plug in a replacement and the system rebuilds itself.
Hey Mike, I have thought about the online backups before, but to be honest I don’t like not having my own data (and the fact that someone else could do who knows what with it). But I will admit it’s probably more reliable and convenient.
As for setting up RAID as you suggested, to do it well costs way too much. The low-end solutions such as the Maxtor are just not good enough, so you have to go for a more expensive solution, I may as well run a full server.
Hey Pat. I also have a Maxtor Shared Storage II 500mb for about 5 months without any problem. I did return the the original unit for having a noisy fan out of the box but the drive itself (while being basic in function) has worked without a hiccup.
As for other NAS solutions the DLINK DNS-323 seems to be a solid performer for just over $200 on ebay. You will need to but 2 drives for it setting you back another few hundred dollars.
You could still return the Maxtor drive as being an intermittent device and receive your refund.
Pat, thanks for the report, I was just about to buy one of these based on my experience with Seagate hard drives, which I have always found to be outstanding and never had a problem with.
It looks like this box is a different story however, so I’m opting for the Netgear ReadyNAS duo.
No probs Pacey. I guess you’re not a Mac users if you’re going for the Netgear. I do like the look of that device, but since it doesn’t support Macs I didn’t consider it. Make sure you have a good look for reports of problems with the thing before you buy it!
Very good, I have had three go trash and they wont atleast admit it. Nice ;;;;;;;
An update on the situation. The NAS device has been working well since the last incident, running pretty much constantly. I put this success down to the cooler ambient temperature now that we’re heading towards winter.
Then all of a sudden it started flashing an error code on the front LEDs. Anyone who has one of the 1TB units will probably be familiar with this code: green orange orange orange orange. This apparently means “filesystem error”. Oh joy.
By this time the device was inaccessible again, neither by HTTP or SMB/CIFS. And I couldn’t turn it off using the power button. Nothing much had been written to the drive since the last backup, so I felt I had nothing to lose. I couldn’t hear the disks spinning so I pulled the power plug. This is a wonderfully satisfying action, especially when accompanied by the (internally spoken) words “die you bastard, die!”.
Plugging the power back in and booting it revealed a working device but the error code was now green orange, indicating a RAID sync problem. Reading the support forums this appears to be quite common, but someone has found a solution. I followed the instructions and was able to rebuild the RAID 1 array by re-adding the disk that had got out of sync. It was surprisingly easy and other than the array rebuilding, took a matter of minutes.
So I now have a solution to the two most common issues:
What else can go wrong?
I couldn’t agree more. More specifically, the problem is worse when dealing with Digiworld. My Maxtor 500GB lasted weeks and was returned for repair/replacement. The diagnosis was to take one week. 8 weeks and counting, 5 phone calls and requests for return calls unanswered, I am told by the Sales Mgr that repairs are the responsibility of the technician, as is customer service and satisfaction!
Hope things improve for you Peter. What was the specific problem you had with the drive?
Thanks for your help. The problem is pretty simple. The disks would not spin although mains power was supplied at the cord. I have advised Seagate, as Digiworld still haven’t returned promised calls. The unit was registered and there is no issue of warranty; just indifference by the retailer.
I have had the exact same problrm with a Maxtor 320 now they want me to send it back with business accounts information on it. I thought it was strange the way they said it must be faulty so quick over the phone.
I think it says a lot about what Seagate think about the Maxtor products they “inherited”.
Thanks Pat, we’re about to buy that Maxtor shared Storage II so since you mentioned that I lost my interest of buying that storage. I’m thinking now about D-Link DNS-323.
[...] enough is enough. I have finally ditched my Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS drive which I had so much trouble with. I was sick of it screwing up, but mostly I was sick of not being confident that my data was [...]
Pat,
Just found your blog via Google. I am using one of the infamous MSSII 1TB drives too and am getting the out of sync RAID every once in a while and have to turn off and on the device to get it back working. Also, I just purchased a D-Link DNS-323 from Amazon and will be working on getting that up and running too. I am wondering if reflashing the firmware with the open-source one will give better stability to the system or is the controller just plain crap? I chose the DNS-323 because of its known reliability, the user-replaceable drive and the fact that it gets great support (at least new firmware releases to address issues). However I do use the Maxtor USB/FW drives and am trying to move more towards user-replaceable systems (that do not void warranty). So what are you using now?
cheers,
Raul
Raul, I’ve decided to go with an Apple Time Capsule, which so far looks good. Getting data from the Maxtor backup is proving time-consuming and a little frustrating, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else.
is there a way to copy the image from one device to another. i have 2 one with a bad HD. i purchased a blank drive and wanted to put the OS on it to get the second running
Hi Mike
Not sure what you’re asking. If you have a single disk Maxtor Shared Storage II and the drive has died and you want to get the image off onto a second unit, I think you’re going to need a data recovery specialist.
On the other hand if you’re saying that you have a dual disk Shared Storage II with one bad disk and you want to replace that disk and rebuild the RAID array, then that is possible. I read that some people were doing this on the support forums:
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board?board.id=mss
I’ve not done it myself, but it doesn’t sound too hard. Note it will definitely void your warranty (just in case you are worried about such things).
cheers
Pat
Pat,
Thank god I’m not the only one going out of my mind! My first drive (500GB maxtor shared storage II) failed at 11 months (just inside warranty) and was replaced. 6 months later, this replacement drive has also failed – this time, I’m getting the cold shoulder from Seagate and I also will never buy seagate or Maxtor again.
After having lost my data twice, I can’t take another risk with an inferior product.
Congrats on a great forum
Cheers
Alex
@Alex glad I could help, even if it was just making you feel like you’re not alone. What exactly were the problems you experienced? Did you try to get your data off either of the drives? It was real tough but when I finally gave up on my Maxtor SSII I did get everything off it.
Update on my Apple Time Capsule: absolutely no problems. It has worked continuously for months now, rarely if ever being turned off. No access denied problems, no overheating problems.
I have the same problem also. It failed last month with 2OOGB worth of critical company data after only 6 month in operation. Lucky I have backed up all the data into another custom 4x 125GB HDD PC which i dedicated for storage. My friend just had the same problem yesterday. Two thumbs down from us for Maxtor and Seagate.
@Jerry glad to hear you managed to survive the Maxtor Shared Storage II experience with your data intact. Did you build your new storage PC yourself or buy it ready-built?
I feel I must add a note of optimism for anyone out there who, like me, has persisted with the Maxtor SS II 1TB through thick and thin..
My needs are simple – I’m not bothered with RAID and just need daily backups and archiving/playback of recorded TV, photos, music etc. on my wired/wireless home network (2 desktops, 1 HTPC, 1 laptop).
Although in 14 months of usage I have never encountered the sort of catastrophic disk failures reported here, I did find the SS not to be ‘fit for purpose’, given that the thing hung terminally (i.e. needing disconnect from mains power to reboot) almost on a daily basis, scheduled backups invariably failed and the print server was really slow to respond, just to name the defects I can recall.
In the light of this experience, I didn’t use it for storing anything I’m not prepared to lose and wouldn’t use it for scheduled recording from TV.
My frequent visits to the Maxtor support site hoping for a firmware/software update over the past year – beginning to seem like a triumph of hope over experience – were rewarded last month when I found a new topic on the Maxtor support site “Converting Maxtor Shared Storage II to Central Axis” which in effect, is a two stage software/firmware upgrade that has transformed the SS from a not very comfortable cat warmer into a useful NAS device. See link:
http://www.seagate.com/…a6e8dc2aff779110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD
Result: No more hard crashes, start up is much faster, the print server works reliably AND you get the benefit (if you want it) of remote access to your data. In other words, the product now works in a fashion that one would reasonably expect of a company of the standing of Maxtor-Seagate. I can’t say if this would solve the problem with disk unreliability but my guess is that the firmware and software would likely be a big factor, given the basic reliability of hard drives these days…
That’s great news Al!
I gave up on it, but it is good to hear that some progress has been made to rectify some, if not all, of the the problems with this product.
Hopefully this will offer some relief to those people who end up on this page looking for answers.
Just came across this along with some very scathing reviews of this product… Unfortunately, it was only after buying 4 of them dirt cheap from eCost.com. They were purchased strictly for backup and have been running flawlessly combined with SyncBack (backup software) for about a month. Until…
Last night I had to relocate them, which meant powering them down. When they came back on, one of them sounded like a leaf blower. Couldn’t tell if it was a bad fan, the drive itself or both (I work in technology, so of course I assumed the worst). I was able to connect to it after all the ruckus stopped and then ran diagnostics. Confirming my fears, the drive came up “needs replacement”, etc. Very unsettling to say the least for a drive that’s so new.
Since the drive was just a mirror image of another in a machine, there was no data loss and I just moved the backup job to one of the other drives. Went to the warranty service section of the Maxtor/Seagate site, got a return approval and will be packing up the drive tonight. Pretty lame that they don’t give you a prepaid shipping label when it’s practically a brand new drive. In retrospect, maybe I should have tried getting eCost.com to take care of it. Also, the model & serial number that came up on the diagnostics screen were not valid according the to the warranty check. I had to use the info from the back of the drive (which was different).
Anyway, a few questions for anyone willing to read on:
1) This model is a single 1TB drive (not 2 x 500GB drives), correct? Apologies if this is a dumb question, but I’ve seen RAID mentioned when discussing these drives and wasn’t sure.
2) Is it better to leave the power management off? Drives typically go bad when they are stopped/started (case in point), so all my machines are set to NEVER spin down their drives. I’m now hearing that drives today are not meant to be left on 24/7…
What’s the latest opinion on this?
3) Could heat be the culprit here? I read some comments about temperature being an issue. Should I put a couple of case fans behind them to be safe?
4) Would it be OK to sit them on their sides and stack them (would it actually be better to orient them horizontally instead of vertically)?
5) Would it be worth performing the Central Axis conversion in my situation? It seems the biggest advantage is web access, but I don’t plan on using that.
As I am (thus far) not in a position of losing data, I’m willing to play around a bit more before I abandon them and go to something else. Any info/suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to post your experiences and read about mine.
@deckard it sounds like you were a bit better off than some of us (ie those who were using the drive not as a backup but as a master).
To answer your questions:
Best of luck
I have to whole heartedly agree!! I have had a shocking experience which I will not go into as is will get me very angry.
Well after 13 months, guess what, catastrophic failure and I just lost 800GB worth of data, DO NOT BUY ANY MAXTOR OR SEAGATE PRODUCTS.
I will never be buying any of there products again, I rang there support line and they said immediately, “we can give you the phone number for a disk recovery company!!!”
Sorry to hear that Dan. I am surprised they offered to give you the phone number for a data recovery service, I had to look that up myself!
Any idea what you might use as a replacement?
I too am a proud owner of the Maxtor 1TB door stop! Wonderful, isn’t it?
You’re not actually trying to use this as a data storage device are you? lol.
I keep hopeing for a firmware update as it seems this is the culprit, but apparently our pals at Seagate really could care less. I’m gonna give Central Axis a shot. What a POS.
Just happening last week …
A friend called for help, his 18 months MSS failed and considering there are sensitive data inside they are not going to data recovery company ..
Having no experience at all with NAS, I just wondering what can I do for getting the data .. So starting with reading the manuals, then try to power up the system and see what happened …
Power LED solid green, front upper LED is green blinking of death … no network connection .. nothing … just a click click and low humming inside ..
As they said the warranty is over, I cracked up the unit … and found out they are 2×500GB .. they said it configured as RAID-0 ..
Back to basic, first I checked both disk using Spinrite for disk and sector healthiness {connected to PC’s SATA port and power supply}, due to clicketyclick I heard before .. after 4 hours level-1 checking both are okey .. so my hunch is the adaptor degraded => not have enough juice to power up 2 harddisks plus system ..
So I connected the data cable from MSS unit, power supply from PC connected to both harddisks, connect UTP cross-cable from MSS to PC, set static IP address on PC, install the MSS software on PC and then powering up the MSS unit using it’s adaptor ….
Power LED solid green, front upper LED is blinking green amber-amber-amber …. but hello … the MSS software detect the storage !!!
My hunch is right … the adaptor is not powerful enough after 18 months of usage …
Don’t care with the blinking, I just backed up all the data to local harddisk …
I propose to my friend to use a modified SATA PC’s power supply to power up the MSS Unit .. and use them again.
Hope this help for people suffering the same error …
That’s good news Sai, thanks for sharing some details on your solution.
I had two of the 1TB MSS II drives, with both gave up the ghost in less than a week of each other (just outside of the 1yr warranty). First one started overheating, and also quite unhappy with the technical service at Seagate. For example, I mentioned that it was showing a power LED sequence of green orange orange orange, but even when I pointedly asked what does that mean, the technician never answered the question. I ran a diagnostic on it, and after that I could not access or reset it. Second drive died suddenly, when it was turned on one morning, the back power light turned off briefly every 7 secs or so, but would not allow any access or reseting of it. The data recovery company (agree with you that Payam are very helpful and friendly) believe causes were a faulty read/write head and an electrical fault respectively.
Talking to computer companies locally since, they have all said Maxtor drives seem to be the brand with most problems, and that Seagate ones were having some probs as well. WD and Samsung had least problems. Sadly I have new 500gb Maxtor for personal backup and am waiting for it to fail as well, I’m thinking I should get another disk to be the backup of the backup! I won’t buy them anymore now and will happily warn others as well.
I know of others using the plain 1TB Maxtor drives that are having intermittent problems with them, too.
Thanks for the input Ronii. Did you find that cooling the overheating unit had any beneficial effect?
Guys/Gals,
Revelation – after recovering from the worst possible situation by installing OpenMSS 3.1.28 firmware with SSH, I can report the following:
The PSU failed “partially” and caused all the issues. The hard disks were FINE.
I’ve since replace the PSU and all is well. Having the luxury of SSH’ing in and rebuilding the RAID1 pair when the firmware takes a drive offline “because it can”, is very reassuring, as is knowing the GNUtar format of the backups (incremental) that get written to the permanently attached USB storage on the back, is very heart warming.
My guess is Maxtor spent NO money on providing fit-for-purpose PSU’s on these things (output rated 12v@3.A), which will cause all manor of unique failures to occur with an unstable 12V supply. I moved my PSU to another MSSII and the fault moved with the PSU.
Suggest you try that before troubleshooting taking these bricks apart.
Being Linux enabled, and understanding software RAID formats did help me along the way – not recommended reading for Windows only users 8-/
Thanks,
–Rob.
cheers @Rob, all evidence now points to the power supply. Thanks for contributing.
I have had a triple disaster: I purchased two WD 1 TB drives which I used as backup for my laptop.
The both failed to read on the third day, I returned them hoping for a replacement.. “No, we need to check you purchased them from us, so phone tomorrow”. Then, the next day “oh, we have sent them back for evaluation”……… now 6 weeks later, no response, plus 8 days ago, my laptop was nicked at 2:45 am during a home invasion wherein 2 laptops, 3 mobile phones plus was removed! So much for backups, misfortune and technology.
Just to add my experience to this – I had a Shared Storage device that failed – refusing to initialise. Was configured as RAID 1 with 2×500 Gb drives. Some familiar sounds of death coming from one of the disks. Out of warranty so I took it apart, and identified the noisy disk. I removed this from the array and recycled the power/system reboot etc. The system initialised and I was able to read (and write) to the remaining healthy disk. Needless to say I now have a different NAS.
BUT… This does mean I have 1) a healthy power supply and 2) a healthy controller board which I dont need anymore.
Hi Jon, do you think that possibly the PSU or controller are responsible for the disk going bad? If not perhaps some batches have good PSU/controller and other batches have bad ones.
Hello Pat – no I dont think so. At least, not on this occasion for me. The HDD sounded like it suffered a mechanical failure – the other disk bought at the same time reported power on hours at 2627 so I imagine the failed one would have had the same given their matched pair status. The PSU supply checked ou on load testing OK so if that was the problem it was transient. My best guess is that the Seagate disk itself failed. Not impossible, I suppose. Out of interest, I swapped the working disk to the other SATA channel and this worked OK, suggesting it wasnt a controller board issue. As much as one can state these things!
Hi Pat, actually I’ve discovered your blog when i was trying to fine any immediate solution with my MSS(ii)-1TB (which belong to my office). I’ve been assigned to take care of this NAS storage which is very new to me (in other word, i’m really a beginner). Currently, my pc running with Ubuntu which i’m also quite new to Linux OS (almost 6 month) before this i’m a Windows OS user.
So my problem is like this; After a month I’ve used it (without switch it off), then I’ve decided to relocate it position (to a suitable place but still using the same pc) which I have to OFF it in order to do it. I tried to OFF it using it’s power button, but nothing happened. Then i just power-off the power supply.
Later, i switch-ON it back, the Power LED was shown as Yellow/Green without blinking, But when i try to access it(neither by HTTP or SMB/CIFS), i could not do it. I don’t know why, because when i ping the ip address, i got the reply.
So I’m really glad if you can give me any ideas or tips or steps or solutions on how to overcome my problem, so that i can get my data back. Hope you can understand my writing, because my English is not quite good, thanks.
Hi Pyan, I don’t know if I can help other than point you towards the various solutions mentioned in comments on this post and the Seagate support forums.
I have now gone through three Shared Storage II devices, waiting on the delivery of the fourth. Very sad I didn’t do more research before purchasing.
I know how you feel!
I can confirm the power-supply fix. I just had a 1TB Shared Storage II freak out on me… flashing lights galore, but no boot. Reset didn’t work, nor did the power button. Pulling the power cord has solved hang-ups in the past, but that didn’t work either. I’d just about given up, when I Googled my way onto this page.
Amazingly enough, I happened to have a spare MSS2 unit in mothballs. So I pulled out the unused power brick and used it to replace the one that had been in operation. Guess what: everything works great again.
Ridiculous, but a whole lot easier than rebuilding the whole data store. Thanks for the tip, folks!! All I need now is to find a device to replace the MMS2 before I run out of power supplies…
Hello. I came across this page as I looked for help on recovering my 1TB Shared Storage II Drive. The top light is flashing green, amber, amber, amber, amber. My network is not detecting the drive.
I have a lot of personal data on it that I need to recover. After reading through these posts it seems as though the problem may simply be the power supply. Can anyone confirm this? If yes, do I just need to buy a new power supply (the brick)?
If this doesnt work, can someone give me steps on how to recover the data. I am a Windows user, so I do not know anything about Linux. Thanks so much for any help provided.
Hi all,
I share the problem on the Shared Storage II — power light flashes one green followed by four amber. Can someone clarify something for a bit of a novice: what is the power brick? I presume that is not the same as the adaptor. Do I need to open up the case to do this?
Rather conveniently, my drive began failing exactly 1 week after the warranty expired!
Thanks!
@Ken yep I do believe that when people refer to the “power brick” they mean the AC adapter. That’s probably what pisses me off the most about this product, the main issues seem to come down to something so easy to replace.
Hi, So I have a MSSII with 1TB drives, one failed out of warrenty, I was running RAID 0 (I know!) so my data was toast. Having a company do a physical platter swapout onto the second drive to get data back. Nett result, I have purchased two brand new 1.5TB drives (smallest they had now) and need to rebuild the NAS from scratch. So raw drives, no EXT3 partitions or flash copies of the Drive OS / firmware (I read that Maxtor installs the OS on the drives, silly!). Can anyone help with the instruction set to rebuild from scratch, i.e.. Where can I can the flash firmware/OS, etc?
Lesson learnt, the MSSII (if and when back up and running) will be my third-line backup, certainly not primary.
Thanks
@Justin sorry I can’t help you, I didn’t persist with the drives that far! Perhaps someone else knows the answer to your dilemma. Best of luck.
just have a spare time to hack MSS II again ..
as the original adaptor doesn’t have enough juice to power up 2 SATA disks and controller, I bought PC’s ATX PSU and cut the original adaptor’s plug and connect the yellow black wire for 12V of the controller ..
For harddisks i connected them to another PSU connector [harddisk power not driven from controller]
*** orig adaptor thrown to trash … heheheheh ***
Now I’m seeking firmware w/ SSH like Rob L. above …
warm regards from Jakarta..
Well this is the most unreliable piuece of hardware ever produced. I have four of them with two customers and have had to replace each of them twice. I am now looking at third replacement for one and a forth replacement for another. DO NOT PURCHASE MAXTOR / SEAGATE products. Yeah I know they are under warrenty but these units are just crap.
There hadn’t been any comments on this post for a while, so I assumed the rate of people falling victim to this product had fallen. Sadly that’s not true.
Well I had been following this site myself as this all started months ago. Believe it or not I walked in this morning to another failed unit (Different customer) Flashing green light and the sounds for click click click. So now I get to deal with two failed units within 48 hours of each other. Thinkg about forwarding all my support emails and links to this and other sites to http://www.sfmslaw.com/pages/cases.php?id=129
So does anybody have a good recommedation on a NAS unit to replace these? I know it will cost the customer $$ but at least maybe I can give them some peace of mind.
@frw well I went with an Apple Timecapsule (my reasons are explained here). There have been a few other suggestions in the comments here.
Personally, I think that in order to get the features the Maxtor was promising you need to spend a lot more to have any confidence it’s going to last.
Thanks for the input but I’ll keep looking as apple is another company I don’t do business with. They can’t learn how to make a product with user replaceable batteries.
I must be lucky. I’ve had a Maxtor SSII for almost 2 years now. It’s running the central axis firmware v3.5.74. My backups to an external maxtor drive happen regularly as expected.
I’ve tested reading my backup drive from windows using the ext2fs app and that works. (haven’t tried from my macs yet).
Since it’s been 2 years I’m looking for a better alternative to backups. I’m considering getting a drobo with the network attachment. Any thoughts on that?
Our Maxtor SSII was replaced under warranty but the second one failed several months later. We suspected that the HD was still working so bought a cheap SATA “Docking Station”, plugged in the 320GB drive – and it worked. It’s the easy way to start and having recovered the data, a new disk in the Docking Station should keep us going with more confidence.
I can not agree with more. Poor quality product and poorer quality support. Seagate is cheap and NOT worthy. Spend your $s elsewhere.
Folks, have read the posts with interest after my MSS II 1TB model became inaccessible, and showing flashing green-amber-amber-amber on front panel LED.
Two years old, so did not even try the Seagate tech support route after reading the views expressed herein. Replaced the power supply transformer (the “brick”) with a 12V, 5A model (original unit supplied is 12V, 3A) – $65 from Jaycar, hoping that was indeed the problem. No joy.
Opened the box and powered up the drives separately via desktop cable connectors, within Linux (having created SLAX bootable CD as explained above).
Can read both HDD’s ok – three apparent drives on each 500GB HDD. Lots of directories and files – but as I am not familiar with Linux, I don’t recognise anything that looks like my data. Since I can’t remember whether I set the MSS II to RAID 0 or 1, when I set it up 2 years ago, I am not sure whether the lack of recognition is because the data has been streamed (RAID 0) or because it is Linux, but I noted an earlier post that the MSS II, even when set to RAID 0 does not stream, it stores serially, so my data sounds like it may be OK, it’s just that I can’t see it in a familiar way.
What do the experts recommend?
BTW – have gone with a new NetGear model, which allows individual drive accessability rather than having to destroy the enclosure when there is a need to replace a HDD!
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