Tuesday 26 May 2009

Thermaltake Silver River Duo USB HDD Enclosure – Fail

A while back we had a bunch of problems with the Vantec NexStar3 enclosures we were using for backups on Intel server board based servers.

A warm boot would stall the server with a blinking cursor just before the BIOS information would show itself.

With the S5000PSLxxxR series and the S3200SH series boards Intel has put a BIOS setting to disable booting to USB so the point is now moot.

We have since gone back to the NexStar3 enclosures.

What we are finding now though is that the power blocks on the Thermaltake Silver River Duo enclosures are bad.

We have Vantecs that have been in operation for a number of years now and to date have not had one bad power block.

We have 6 bad power blocks waiting for their replacement from Thermaltake.

Most of the time when they fail, they do not outright stop the hard drive from spinning up. The status light comes on and the drive does indeed spin up. But, once the system needs to write data to the hard drive the enclosure’s status light will be in activity mode and the server will sometimes lock right up.

Since we sold a lot of these enclosures during the S3000AH and S5000PSLxxx product time period, we are anticipating more failures to come.

Previous posts on the subject:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

No comments: