Last week I bought a NAS and some spanky 6TB drives. All's been going well, except for the case fan.

Last time I powered it up, there was a cthonic grinding sound, so I thought a wire was being hit by the fan blades. It stopped after a few seconds, so didn't think much about it 'til the NAS started beeping and a notification popped up via the web UI saying the fan had stopped working.

After taking the fan out, it's obviously a bearing problem, it'll spin a bit, then get stuck and the motor can't overcome it. I've got a replacement fan from work, which I'll stick in tonight. Unfortunately I've torn through an aluminium sticker to get the cable out. I thought the sticker was there to hold the cable in place in lieu of a cable tie, but after reading Synology's replacement guide, there's a bit about replacing the sticker after putting a new fan in (the attached pic is from the guide). I'm guessing it's there as some sort of grounding for the ethernet port, but I'm not sure. There's enough unbroken sticker to go from the case to the top of the port, so it'll still make the connection.

Is it important? Can I live without it, or will it mean the end of mankind as we know it?




 

If it was me, I wouldn't risk too much. Take the case off if you can and don't work the CPU too hard.  It's just a couple of days irritation against the (hopefully faint) possibility of burning out something expensive.

Seriously underused word. Thanks!

 :-O~~~

I've replaced the fan, and it's running OK now and the temps are normal. However the box is doing some thumbnail creation (weirdly called converting) on the 25000+ images I've got in there. Looking on Synology's forum it's cos of the pre-installed image software and it'll go and create a separate thumbnail for each picture. I've tried disabling the software, but the process stubbornly refuses to stop. It's not really a problem, but it's pegging the CPU at 99% and it looks like it's going to take a few days to finish.

(bounce)

Yeah our qnap NAS defaulted to something similar, luckily I managed to intercept before it got out of hand.

Well that's a prize pain in the arse, to be sure.

Yep, and having looked at the photo gallery app it comes with, I'm gonna get rid of it, as I'll never use it. Same with the media server app. After a bit of googling I've found a way that is supposed to stop the task.  

It's a browser based thing that takes a while to generate all the thumbnails for the images (admittedly when the 'conversion' task finishes, this might be quicker) and it divides them all into pages showing something like 50 at a time by default. I've got some folders with hundreds of photos in and I don't want to have to click through 4/5 pages to get to the image I want. Plus who wants to look at a local folder of photos through a web page?



 

If it's the same as came on board the qnap, it uses imagemajick. Fair enough, until it starts to tackle >10 MB images on what is essentially a woefully underpowered pc.

Also, the gallery feature just suxors on a good day.

Good luck with that.  Why do they put bloaty shite on in the first place?

Got it sorted, in addition to removing the photo/media server apps, there's an option to remove the index itself and that's stopped the process.

I guess they lease/procure apps from 3rd parties and take a fee for including them in the software. HP used to be buggers for it, there's still a lot of crap on the desktop PCs we get at work, but nowhere near the amount they used to have, it'd take something like half a day to get rid of it all.

AFAIK the consumer NAS purveyors take open source, without thanks or attribution, and 'customize' it (aka fuck it up) with all kinds of half-assed, performance and stability -killing add-ons they think folks want.

I very much doubt that bit of tape does anything except keep the cable in place. So yeh, no worries.

Steve - they have all this crap on them so that they're out-of-the-box-useful for non-techie types. Good enough reason really, but a PITA.

Ace biscuits.

Now begins the long slog of ripping all our existing films n' that.

Just download. Don't bother wasting your time ripping, Jim will help.

I'm a bit anal about my media collection - ripped all my CDs a while back as FLAC and made sure all the album was correct. I recently started using Musicbee as a player and it pissed me off at first as it decided it was going to download what it thought I should have as album art rather than looking in the local folder for an image. I got this sorted after fiddling with the many many options it's got. :)

When it comes to films, I want a rip of the disc in high quality with the audio options configured to how I want them - you're always going to be chancing it with a download. I also get the option on whether or not to keep any extras, like audio commentary - something that's well worth it with the likes of Red Dwarf.  I appreciate it'll be quicker, but a DVD takes around 1.5 hours to rip, blu-rays maybe 2, but I can leave them going during the day/overnight while I'm doing other stuff. It's not an inconvenience, just time consuming.

If it's a full and complete rip then that definitely makes sense, rather than reencoding/compressing.

I don't like to download low quality rips, but I also don't want a full 30GB+ blu-ray rip taking up loads of space!