Comments on: Maxtor Shared Storage II Hands On

By: c. schmidt

c. schmidt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:34:50 +0000

I’ll join your calss action list. This thing is a piece.

By: ems

ems — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:25:57 +0000

looking for 10 + owners of failed units to file a class action suit. item does not do what it is designed to do

By: John

John — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:44:09 +0000

I think a lot people that use this product should save themself some time and go for a external hard drive instead. This is NAS box, using configuration other than Raid 1 doesn’t make any sense. People have no idea what raid is and use the configuration out of the box, when one of the drive breaks and compain for not getting data back. Of course you not be able to get data back, it is raid 0! Most people running daily backup from this nas box to an external harddrive. Unless they version their backup, what is the point of doing this other than spinning drive on the nightly basis and gain nothing. Set up Raid one, when one drive breaks, put in a new drive and rebuild raid 1.

By: mike

mike — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:59:40 +0000

the worst Maxtor shared storage II I have had three of these go out on me… Not reliable… In about 3 months these things just start clicking and making noise. powere light starts blinking and my computer or the supplied software cannot locat the connected storage devise..
I would not buy this . JUNK

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:01:07 +0000

same thing as everyone else. I’ve gone through 3 of these drives within a year. The drives themselves are usually ok. It’s just the OS and anything else they’ve wrapped around the drives. So, if you want to save your data, you can usually just crack the drive and hook them up directly. It voids the warranty, but at this point the feedback in the market is overwhelmingly negative. I’m not sure why anyone would continue to put data on these unless it’s running as a backup (or second line backup).

By: Bas

Bas — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:53:27 +0000

I found a possible solution on http://www.openmss.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1078&p=5572#p5174

Has anyone tried it? For this solution you need to open the unit and you’ll loos your warranty probably…. This is what it said:

“Try to change the two HDD-Connectors in the MSSII against each other, try to start…..WAIT 1hour…disconnect power, try again, WAIT again
dont care about the different lights …use “first-connect” procedure.

If you are lucky the unit starts and you will find it again..fine

if not..change the SATA-Connectors again to them original position again try to start…WAIT..dont care the lights..WAIT
and latestly now the Unit should be able to start again by forced using another of it´s four boot-partitions after the heavy boot-mistakes you produce by this crazy “change” procedure
( in your case: there are 2 copies of the boot-partition on each drive!!) mostly this recovers bad problems on a corrupted boot-partition”

By: Bas

Bas — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:34:37 +0000

Again, another victim. After 6 month, I also experiencing problems with my SSD II. Top LED is constantly blinking and drive doesn’t seem to boot. Tried resetting, holding button on the back, changed the power cord from the adaptor, but nothing seems to help. What I read here brings me to the solution that I have to open up this thing and get a linux machine to free my data. I am very disappointed in this machine. Is there anybody who knows a solution to resolve the blinking / non rebooting issue? Otherwise there is nothing else left then taking this thing apart and try to get my data to another disk.

By: marcel

marcel — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:42:36 +0000

Hi Everyone,
Before I read your articless I was so naive and I thought that I have just some small issue with my Fuc…g MAXTOR. Now it seams that problem I have is very similar to yours TOP LED DIODEs just blinking and blinking and blinking and blinking … and I feel more and more sure that my data will be LOST. Is there anyone in this space who can safa my data ( I only wants picture of my family all the rest I can forget ) THNX – I will definetly make good promotion how to NOT BUY MAXTOR product anymore.

By: brian

brian — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:46:27 +0000

Complete Crap. Here is my recent transcript with their support.

Jeffery H.: Hi, my name is Jeffery H.. How may I help you?
[ME]: I have the 1TB version of the SharedStorageII NAS unit. For the past couple of months it has been randomly falling off of the network, unable to be found by the installed software utility and unaccessible via the network share
[ME]: if i reset it using a paper clip in the reset hole, it would work for a few hours and die again.
[ME]: last night i reset it again
[ME]: it appeared to be working last night. this evening it is making a high pitched squealing noise and periodically making what sounds like a chirping sound
[ME]: the top light on the front panel is amber
[ME]: last night it was flashing b/w green and amber
[ME]: the bottom light is randomly flashing green
Jeffery H.: if its squealing and chirriping then you’ve got a failed drive.
[ME]: i have only used it for a total of about 6 hours, but am unsure how long ago i purchased it
[ME]: can you look up when it was purchased by the s/n?
[ME]: what is the warranty on this unit?
Jeffery H.: it has a 1 year warranty and seems to have expired
[ME]: i believe i have it configured in raid 10 (usable capacity is 500TB)
[ME]: is it possible to get it repaired?
Jeffery H.: We do not have a paid repair service and the drives are not field repairable.
[ME]: so it’s a $500 paper weight?
Jeffery H.: Unfortunately at this point.
Jeffery H. has disconnected.

By: Kedhow

Kedhow — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:20:42 +0000

I have had a MSSII 500GB unit for a 2 years now. Its been fine and not missed a beat. It sits in the loft out of sight and mind and backs up various systems and stores photos and music. I would like to get a second 500Gb unit and replicate them over my network to safeguard the data especially the photos. Anyone know someone who wants to sell a unit?

By: Shogun

Shogun — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:35:16 +0000

Guess what. It appear both drives are ok. But one of them just wasn’t updated (RAID1) for… months!!! Without warning.

By: Shogun

Shogun — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:45:36 +0000

Hi there. I bought this maxtor f**l of sh**t piece of junk to get affordable (but not cheap!) raid solution without the noise of a real server. I set it in RAID 1 mode. Decent performances, despite a very slow web admin. Not fast. Neither very silent, but I thought “well this is raid linux, should be safe”…

And then it failed. fast green blinking (upper light). No hard drive sound at all, no help on seagate/maxtor website about that issue.

I managed to recover my data, and I’ll explain it to you in a few lines. In the meantime, my advice is “DO NOT BUY THIS. DO NOT BUY ANYTHING FROM MAXTOR. DO NOT LET THEM BELIEVE THEY CAN SCR** YOU LIKE THAT”. And since I’m quoting, I’m not sorry for the caps, cause they are for Maxtor.

And then I saw it: 1) Do NOT open or your loose your warranty. 2) Backup your date BEFORE you send it to our technical support because we WILL send you back empty drives.

Well, even if they would say “We will try as HARD as possible to get your data back” I would never send a potentially almost broken hard drive by mail would I? That would definitely kill it then, no? Besides that, how the hell could I trust them? My data is PRECIOUS. It is my WORK.

So what about doing a backup of my biggest storage drive? Should I buy another f**cking maxtor external drive?

My point of view is if shouldn’t be allowed to sell data storage stuff without allowing to access the data inside. It is not like if I were trying to open the hard drive itself, uh?

So, how did I do to recover my data?

First of all I needed some storage big enough to handle it. I recently bought a MyBook, almost empty so far, that would be enough.

Thanks to your help, I figured out how to open this thing. Why in hell are they assembling these things in such a way any attempt to dismantle it is a chinese braingame? So, after a few zen minutes, I managed to do it without breaking it. And I had to break no less than 3 (warranty void?) stickers to get through.

Since I’m not a linux guy, I tryed to find a way to get data back from XP. I connected one of the drives to usb trough an external sata enclosure. Using diskinternals linux reader I saw the biggest partition as “linux raid”. But could’nt retrieve any data. But I could’ve done some image backup if I wanted to.

I also tried the ext2/3 driver for XP but no luck.

Acronis bootable disk manager did saw the linux raid partition too, but could’nt do anything with it.

I would probably have tried installing linux (or booting it if I had one) but I thought of something else.

What if the problem is some weakness of the main power supply not getting trough the circuits to the drives anymore?

I then tested booting with only one drive connected. Still nothing.

Last, I brought another computer next to the now “not so shiny” peace of junk and managed to connect the power supply from the PC to the harddrive, and the sata to the maxtor coyote circuit (yeah it says ‘maxtor coyote’ on them) using one spare cable (the included connectors are not suited for that).

I booted the PC so power went on my hard drive. After a few time I powered up the maxtor shared storage. Guess what: fast blinking green light. Ho my. Am I cursed?

And I waited a few more minutes before cutting of the power. And it finally worked. The unit shortly switched to orange light and booted up. I could get normal access to it so I immediatly started to back up everything.

Since I replaced the default copy engine of windows XP with TeraCopy I had no problems to duplicate millions of files trough the network. Happy I am.

So, this is my final advice: try to supply the harddrive with alternate powersource. It might just be that. And don’t buy such peaces of marketing junk anymore :-)

Hope this will help some of you getting your precious data back.

Take care!

By: Peter H

Peter H — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:18:02 +0000

Have had a MSS II 1 TB for just over 12 months, it connected to my laptop, running XP2, in FAT files,without any problems, but would not connect to my desktop, also running XP2, but in NTS. Contacted Maxtor/Seagate by E-Mail, next to useless, after 3 E-mails, they told me to follow instructions supplied with the unit, tried everthing I could find to fix this problem, no luck. I then tried to backup my files, finished up utterly confused. Last week I tried to back up my files on my laptop and noticed that the unit was making a clicking sound, tried everything I could find to connect to the unit, can’t switch the unit off via switch on back, l can’t connect, even though it shows up on ‘My Computer’. Anyone who is thinking of buying one of these units should be very careful, in my opinion I wasted $A640.00 on a piece of JUNK. I will never buy anything made by Maxtor/Seagate again, if they are trying to stay in business, this is not the way to go

By: igor

igor — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:14:15 +0000

if one of the drives fails, the device becomes unaccessibkle from the network, as if it is stuck in some loop. if you open up the box and disconnect the failed drive, then start and connect to network, the device is accessible over the network again and you can get your data from the remaining working drive, if not mount it in linux as a windows partition, then I could copy my data to another mounted drive, I used a ubuntu boot cd.

By: igor

igor — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:10:16 +0000

i mounted the drive in linux (some boot cd, think it was ubuntu) as a windows partition and was able to copy the data to another drive.

By: Salman Ahmed

Salman Ahmed — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:17:32 +0000

I had it replaced twice in eight months and the recent replacement has also died. By now I know that the RAID is for name only so I did not lose any data. Just stay away from this product.

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:19:35 +0000

Anyone know how to get the drives out of this thing without a baseball bat?

By: LJR

LJR — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:36:04 +0000

P.S. The new Maxtor Central Axis software provides facilities for recovering from a failed drive when the unit is in mirrored mode. The instructions they provide are for their new drive configuration. However, considering that the software can be installed on a MSII as well, it is reasonable to believe that the recovery process will work there too. The only catch is that the case is a bit hard to dismantle. However, once the shroud is off, getting the drives out is a snap. The trick is to get the side panels off. They snap in with little plastic tabs and I had fiddle around for several minutes to get them freed up. There isn’t any place to insert a screwdriver blade – darn it.

However, this new capability means you don’t have to ship the unit back to Seagate when it fails. You can recover the data yourself.

Go to the Seagate site and download the Central Axis beta software if you’re interested. It’s free.

I want to make it clear that I HAVE NOT done this myself. I’ve the read the documentation and it says the software works fine on the MSII units. So be careful and back up your data before you attempt to install the new firmware. You can also download a binary of the current MSII firmware in case you need to get back to where you were.

By: LJR

LJR — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:15:02 +0000

I’ve had a 320GB MSII for six months now. Replaced the firmware with a version that has Telnet. It has worked reliably for me.

At first it was getting hot so I opened up the case and lubricated the fan with some teletype grease. That cured the overheating. The fan is pretty much junk with a sleeve bearing. I left the plastic shroud off so I can get to the fan, the card and the drive if need be. The case shrouding is not designed to be easily removed. I broke a couple of tabs in the removal process. No big deal.

The drive is formatted as ext3 so if there is a problem with the board one can connect the drive to any linux box via a usb adapter or straight to the sata connection and retrieve data.

The drives are standard issue seagates and it’s hard to believe they are selecting bad drives just to install in this unit. These drives would fail in a desktop computer or in a usb external case.

The board is a Marvell reference design and very nicely built ARM design. The processor is fast and there is adequate RAM. The OS resides mostly on the hard drive itself so making changes is quite easy if you have telnet access.

I particularly like the fact that the drive is ext3 formatted because that provides protection from power failure during writes and also allows storing files greater than 2 gb. I use the unit to store mp4 files in iso format so large file compatibility is important to me. Most NAS units force the use of FAT32 as the file format. That sucks. Furthermore, Samba is significantly slower when it has to work with FAT32 vs: native format.

I have never had the drive disconnect or disappear from the network. I have pulled the plug on it when it was running several times and it just comes back to life. In short, it works great.

I have two 320’s now and both work well. Sorry everyone else here seems to be having trouble. Thought I should let the world know that my units are fine. It’s also worth considering as a unit to hack. The innards are pretty much the same as the Buffalo Pro and there is also a developers community for it at the NSLU wiki.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:13:59 +0000

This hard drive is such a piece of shit. I have several drives, but I needed something with good amount of space for storing high definition movies and having them readily accessible. After transferring nearly 900GB worth of movies it crapped out on me. It’s the same issues that’s been listed here. Blinking power led, won’t reset, can’t ping or be recognized by router, won’t turn off…AAAUUUGGHH! Word to the wise, DO NOT BUY THIS HARD DRIVE IF YOU VALUE YOUR DATA! I’ll never buy another Maxtor anything again.