POWER ADAPTERS NSA

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Hi  after 40+ years of playing with computers  I have run into a problem I can not solve and first time have to look to an online group. I have never posted so not sure if I am in the right area  but here goes.

I recently purchased a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra with the plan to populated the unit with two Seagate 8 TB NSA IronWolf drives.  I installed the first IronWolf drive and proceeded to add video files to the drive. Now I find in reading the manual from WD that they do not recommending using drives with a total capacity of 16 TB or over with the power supply in they sent. It was a 12 V 3.0 Amps 36Watts. They are suggesting a 48 watts unit. I checked with Seagate and they said the 36-watt unit should handle both drives. Well after installing the second drive and trying to do a backup of the 3TB of media files I had added to the first drive the My CLOUD ran for about 5 hours and then I received a power failed alert for the My Cloud.  WD or Seagate has not been very helpful in providing the larger power adapter.  I live in Canada and can not find on line or at any local shop a larger power supply. Not sure where to go next.

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Are you able to pull the drives and run diagnostics to make sure the My Cloud device is okay? Are the disk drives okay?

If all is well or WD does not want to try replacing the My Cloud EX2 Ultra unit, maybe you need to ask them if 72 or more watts is enough.

Have a look: Digi-Key, Mouser. Move the scroll bar until you see Power (Watts) or Output Power click Apply there are options for Region.

 

What is the amperage rating of the 48 watt adapter?

Do you know how much amperage the My Cloud unit draws? Four amps is (barely) enough with two IronWolf drives starting up 3.6 (1.8 amps startup each). If the drives have an average draw of 1.5 amperes, then you might need a constant supply of 3 amps. If the My Cloud hardware uses 2.5 amperes on average then that could have been the added to cause of the power supply distress.

Ask WD how many Watts the My Cloud device will use under load. 48 watts – 17.6 (average) wattage for the two drives = 30.4 watts left over, which may not be enough.

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tweedsidecharlie

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Startup current is high and your unit will struggle, but once running all should be OK at 18w  for both drives.

Did the NAS put the drives to sleep during the copy and then attempt to fire them up again? Does it have logs you can check?

Can you remove one of the drives and do the copy again?

cheers, Paul

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tweedsidecharlie

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I looked it up (source is linked below), and each of the two drives has 23.4w draw during start, for a total of ~47w, which may have been why the person suggested a 48w adapter (though the unit itself would have some power usage as well).

Peak wattage during use (sequential write operations being the highest) is 10w each, though, so once the drives have spun up, it should work (as Paul said). That’s if the drives stay in continuous power-on state while in use… if they spin down, the unit will have to power them both up at once, and that’s when the current draw is over the limit.

Sometimes when I am performing a backup over the LAN, there are periods of time where there is little to no network traffic (which correlates pretty well with disk usage on the backup drive).

This is with incremental backups, and I presume what’s going on is that it is checking cached data (or metadata) and assessing whether anything has changed or not since the last backup. From what you describe, that’s probably not the kind of backup you are doing (with new drives, it would probably be a full initial backup).

Still, if there was some other reason why the data flow stopped for a bit, it may have prompted the drives in the NAS to spin down. Then, when the next burst of data comes in, they have to spin up at the same time, and unlike in initial powerup, the NAS itself isn’t idle at that point, as it’s caching or otherwise trying to process the data that is coming in, so the amount of power draw at that point could be even higher than when you initially turn the NAS on, and it may be tripping the overcurrent protection on the power adapter, which could make it shut off momentarily and generate the error you describe.

Source of the power draw info is from the Seagate site (PDF).

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tweedsidecharlie

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