Well I have a similar tale to the others here. My MSS unit is (thankfully) a 500Gb single disk unit with no RAID, so that's one complication saved. Symptoms are as others describe:
- Unit will not boot with power light continuing to flash green, then amber before going back to green
- The unit does not respond to the power button - plug in and the unit is instantly on - the only way to stop is to pull the power
- The unit does not respond to the hard reset
I don't believe there is an issue with the actual disk. The unit's fan can be noisy and has been for a while, quietening after a while of being on, but I believe (maybe incorrectly!) that the drive itself is okay. My suspicion is the controller board as it's impossible to communicate with the box. If the controller were okay and the disk bad, I'd expect to be able to communicate and get disk access errors, but I can't even communicate with the box via any means. It simply isn't on the network although the NIC is operating...or at least the NIC connection and data lights are working.
The trigger for this failure was sustained data transfer. I had 'some fun' with the unit a couple of months ago, got it back (can't remember precisely how!), did a firmware update on the unit (only a minor point release) and that seemed to make things better, but prior to this is was always larger/multiple file copies that would cause the unit to go offline. Anyway, all fixed with the firmware update. However, I was then away for a month, came home forgetting about these problems, started to copy over a bunch of photos and bang...the unit failed with me at first thinking it was Windows on the client as I started to get file access errors. Turned out not to be the client, but the MSS back to its bad old behaviour and clearly the firmware update hadn't helped anything much.
So from reading this forum and other pieces I got a replacement 12V5A power source based on some peolpe's experiences, but no luck. Have tried booting with no network connected, but again no luck. Now trying cooling the unit in a freezer (locked in an airtight bag) to see if that might reset any NVM, but I have my doubts. Suspect I am heading towards breaking the unit open, removing the disk, putting into a Win7 machine, loading Ext2 IFS and so mounting the disk, will copy everything off, reformat as NTFS and then simply use as additional internal storage.
I guess reading all this the thing that really strikes me is the total absense of comment/advice/support from Seagate. The only action I've seen from Seagate is to delete/edit some peoples comments, presumably as they were considered too 'colourful' in their post. So if there is anyone from Seagate reading this, just note that the total lack of support or advice from Seagate looks really really bad, as in REALLY bad. It results in this just becoming a user complaint board. Instead of suggestions and fixes from Seagate and other users chipping in success stories, there is no support and no advice from Seagate and moastly nothing but complaints from users stuck with data lost on failed units. So here's a little feedback for the Seagate Marketing Director; the lack of Seagate support in this forum really reflects badly on the company and so it's products. Remember, customers are hard one and easily lost, and the lack of attention to this forum at least in my opinion, is an easy loss of customers. I'd not like to guess the propensity of most posters here to buy Seagate again, whereas a little well placed support and advice could turn this into a superd service.
