Well finished rebuilding my second NAS into a new chassis identical to the other with the same specifications as the other NAS today with a few issues. Everything went pretty much the same as the other NAS rebuild except that I discovered damaged bays on the backplane on the upper right hand bay and then the bay just below that are completely smashed preventing the drives from sliding in.
So being that this chassis has 4 bays across and 4 bays down and the controller plugs into each row and I have 8 drives to place into these bays means I need two complete rows to make my current situation work in this chassis. Thankfully when I checked the two lower bays they had no damage. Still I could not get the drives into the end slots.
With the top of the case off I looked at the backplane and noticed that the right side was not seated properly and apparently someone had done the no-no for computers and tried to torque the drives into the end slots anyway without figuring out why they didn’t go in smoothly!
So I made sure no drives were in the bays loosened the screws on the backplane and straightened out the backplane and was able to get the drives to slide in on the bottom rows all the way across. I then had to run the cables from my SAS card to the bottom rows of the backplane. Next step trying to get backplane replaced for future expansion and get the accompanying and missing SAS cable for the backplane as well.
So I was able to get FreeNAS up again and it’s interacting with my virtual environment just fine plus sharing out other storage as well but need to get that new backplane in house for the future to have that warm fuzzy feeling that everything is okay.
I will have more pictures that will be fairly identical to the other later except placement of the drives due to the backplane damage.
