Overnight both of the drives in my DS218+ are signalled as 'Not Initialised'

[Avocette]

Do I have to accept that DSM 7.1.xxxxx will no longer allow me to run Seagate Ironwolf HDDs in my DS218+? Under DSM6 everything worked seamlesslessly for years. I was forced to update to DSM7 with my 4TB HDDs to get back online after a local power outage a month ago and a week later one of the disks crashed. I tried a fresh version of the 4TB disk but it would not initialise. I replaced the 4TB disks (with contents of around 750GB) with my original 1TB disks and after rebuilding the storage pool the NAS was back in operation with disks signalled as Healthy. However, overnight the NAS has gone Critical (beeping) with Storage Manager indicating that both disks are Not Initialised. I have a backup of all my data. Do I just give up the NAS and assume that it's judged to be too old and the Ironwolf disks are no longer on the compatible list? Thanks for your help!

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[Rusty]

Welcome to the forum.

The fact that your drives are not initialized and not flagged as incompatible or unrecognized, as well as the fact that the X18 models have a large list of compatibility, I would say that something else is happening here.

What's the status of the volume atm? In terms of the volume is flagged as critical due to what? Can we see the screenshot of the volume inside the storage manager?

If the drives are not initialized, then you are expected to nuke the volume and create a new one from the detected drives. Still, send us a screenshot just to confirm this.

 

[Avocette]

After the discovery of the Critical issue, I turned off the DS218+ and removed the power. When I powered it up again, the fan started up but the disks didn't and there was a repetitive sound which I thought might be the disks starting up but stopping every few seconds. The Disk LEDs never lit up, and the message in the browser was 'logging in.....'
I switched off and powered down again and replaced the PSU with a fifteen year old one that came with a Synology 110j. Powered up and started the DS218+ and it woke up properly and the browser page shows 'Healthy'.
So maybe the PSU suffered during the power outage a month ago and is now unservicable.

 

[Jan Janowski]

Always good to have a spare power supply, but I’d consider getting g a new one, as 15 years is old for power supply caps.

 

[Avocette]

I agree but at the weekend, needs must!
With this power supply, I swapped over to the original 4TB IronWolf drives and the system signals Critical, once again and indicates one of the drives had ‘Crashed’. But the system allowed me to run a S.M.A.R.T test on that drive which gives the result Healthy (or a similar positive word).
I tried running the disk up on an external SATA to USB block and it worked fine although it is not formatted for the Windows PC that I plugged it into.
I think I have discovered why the new IronWolf 4TB drive I’ve just bought is rejected by the Synology system. It is physically smaller than the original (2021) drives and using the external SATA/USB connection measures 3726.01GB versus the old drive’s 3726.02GB. I guess it’s considered to be too small a replacement!