Well, its been about 3 years since I upgraded my LaCie NAS with some newer,faster parts. The years have been hard on it. It ran 24/7 for about 2 1/2 years and then one day it would no longer boot. The files on it weren’t of a great loss, so I unplugged it and set it aside, awaiting some future troubleshooting.
Well the time is now. I loaded up my NAS and took it to work. I threw it on the workbench, hoping it was a bad power supply or something mundane and easily repaired. The system was from the mid 2000’s and electronics sometimes just get tired. I hooked up a VGA monitor and a mouse keyboard combo and attempted to get it to boot. The power button worked and I could hear fans in the power supply and for the cpu spinning up. but no familiar beep of graphics being initialized. Although there was the cool blue glow of the power button’s LED, the lights for the ethernet ports were strangely silent. I had a bad feeling it was not the power supply. Upon opening the LaCie up, I gave the motherboard a cursory examination and found the cancer of all Millennial electronics, the blown capacitor. Almost all of the caps on the motherboard had domed tops. Like Jiffy pop but without the yummy popcorn.
It looks pretty dire. But… there is still a glimmer of hope. I work for a tech company.. and a few of my electrical engineers actually enjoy fixing broken electronics. I showed it to one guy because I thought it was funny and he offered to replace the caps. It would be very cool if he could get it working again. So it won’t cost me anything to try .. and if the repairs work, my very cool NAS will live on to serve again for years to come.
So I will update this again when I get the board back and we can try and get it working again.
Themagamer
What are your thoughts?