The death of the Seagate BlackArmor 400 NAS

The end of my struggle with the BlackArmor 400 NAS

Posted on May 15, 2016

WARNING: Please note that this article was published a long time ago. The information contained might be outdated.

If you are interested in this post I encourage you to start by reading the older one from 2013: Seagate BlackArmor 400 NAS.

On april 24 2016 one of the drives of my Seagate Blackarmor 400 NAS started making a "clicking" noise and was automatically removed from the RAID volume. This started what I refer to "the end of my struggle with the BlackArmor 400 NAS".

The RAID configuration consisted in 4 hard drives organized in two RAID 1 volumes:

  • hard drives in bay 1 and 2 for the first RAID 1 volume
  • hard drives in bay 3 and 4 for the second RAID 1 volume

The failed drive was the one in bay 1. The drive is a Seagate ST3000DM001 and when I searched for info on it I read some very bed stuff:

I checked if the drive was in some kind of extended warranty, but it wasn't. So, I asked @AskSeagate for a compatible replacement drive, thinking about replacing all four drives, not just the faulty one:

I was pointed to the Seagate ST33000651AS drive, ~100€ on Amazon.

Then, after 4 days, the drive in bay 4 stopped working. This time I had to manually detach it from the second RAID volume to get back the access to the 2nd RAID volume. In just a few days I had only one copy of my backups.

I had to decide fast if I wanted to keep the NAS or try a something different, cloud based, like Blackblaze or Amazon Cloud Drive

While trying the cloud solutions, I backed up the most important stuff on some USB drives I had laying around the house.

Finally I decided to not buy any hard drive and stop using the Blackarmor NAS, and switch to a cloud based solution. I started the upload process to Amazon Cloud Drive using the great rclone tool, copying the data directly from the Blackarmor (I didn't want to touch the USB drives).

Today, 15th day of may 2016, the Blackarmor disappeared from the local network and no restart will give me back access to the data.

I've never been very happy about this device. I'm sure it's just something that is limited to my experience, but still, I'm happy that this is the end of my struggle with the Seagate Blackarmor NAS 400.