Samsung Spinpoint F1 (1TB) and N5200BR

Hello folks,

Today I received two of these drives and installed one into the Thecus. Just the blue power led lights up but no drive access to be noted. Also in the webinterface I do not see the drive appear.

I have a N5200BR (non-PRO) currently running with 3 disks (2 WD caviars and 1 seagate) on raid 5.

I am wondering about any prelimenary steps that might need to be taken to get the N5200 to see the drive. I am still a newbie in using this device so if any one of you has ever come across the same behaviour and found the solution, please let me know. I bought these drives as they have very good specs and I'm pretty sure they will work somehow but the question right now is ...how?

I'm still a newbie and bought the Thecus with the other drives installed for me so I have no clue about the behaviour when a disk is added.

As soon as I know more myself I'll post an update.

Hi,

I have a N5200BR Pro with three Samsung HD103UJ (Firmware 1AA0) on raid-5 now working fine. But at the beginning, I also had the problem that one of them could not be accessed (yellow LED) but the blue LED was on. In the Web-Admin it wasn't shown.

The Problem was that it was not fully pulled in the HDD-Bay. I have pressed the HDD a little bit more into the device and it worked...

Maybe the Samsung HDD's are a little bit smaller or the SATA-contacts?
So I would recommend you, that you check whether your HDD's are really at the end of the HDD-Bay.

Best regards,
Werner Scholze

(Sorry for my bad english. I hope it was understandable)

Hi Werner,

Thank you very much for your reponse. After spending a long afternoon I finally found the reason for this behaviour.

Let me start saying that after this 'fight' the drives are recognized fine and there are no issues anymore. Here's the story:

The exsting three drives at Raid 5 were based in the upper 3 slots. The new F1's in the bottom two.
I turned off the Thecus, removed the existing Raid 5 drives and plugged the new F1's into the upper slots. Turned on the Thecus....Yes! Drives recognized. So... why in the upper slots I wondered?

I then turned off the system again and insert the 2nd F1 into slot 4 and the other 3 disks at random in the remaining slots. Turned on the system again. Now only the 1st F1 was recognized and the others stayd unreadable and the 2nd disk from the top only had it's blue power led turned on. The situation got worse.

I now panicked a bit and stored the three Raid 5 drives back into original position. Now no drive got recognized at all... @#$! Now I restored the F1's back into the 1st and 2nd slot and only the 1st F1 got recognized. I now started to wonder... could the F1's have ruined something regarding the SATA connectors inside the N5200? I pushed the 2nd F1 a bit more and it started to flash green but the N5200 also started to beep frequently and the drive was still not recognized. Even more #@%%@..

Now I put the two F1's into the bottom slots and instead of turning on only with the blue power led, they would not turn on at all.... worse again...

I decided to have a look at the inside of the N5200 and turned my head at the backside of the system. I noticed something strange. The righthandside (when facing frontside) of the backpanel was sticking out a bit. I decided to also losen the other 2 screws and removed the backpanel with the fan. I noticed that the backpanel had several 'pillars' and these pillars seem to be there to keep the circuitboard of the SATA connectors in place. Just that one particular screw not being fastened anymore allowed the circuitboard to move back a little at the moment I inserted the frist F1's into the bottom slots. It all made sense now. I gently pushed the circuitboard back into place and after that the backpannel and made sure that the backpannel was securely fixed again with the three screws.

Now ALL drives are reading normally again. :)

So Werner, when I first read your tip I was also thinking that there might be something strange to the F1's but in fact there is nothing wrong now anymore. Everyone experiencing strange drivebehaviour should have a look at the backside and be sure that the backpannel is securely fixed. If those screws are fixed to loose, you can expect trouble. Just imagine the horror of a drive suddenly being out of power after a slight vibration in the room... It has been a long but interesting afternoon.

Thanx again,

Jan

I have the same problem. 5 Samsung Spinpoint F1 (1TB) and only 3 are recognized despite all 5 blue led are ok. I change position for all disk and now only 2 are recognized.
Thanks nas5200user! for your trick, now I have some chanche to solve this crazy & unexpected problem.

I have similar problem.
Is there someone who checked HD103UJ by using smartctl of SSH module ?