Tonidoplug Power Supply failure

I’ve been using my tonidoplug as a home NAS server for almost a couple of years now. It’s performed as well as can be expected for 2 mirrored 1.5TB disks attached on a USB hub.

One evening recently though I noticed that it was unreachable. A quick look at the box showed that all was not well, both lights on the network interface were on as was the green light on the box. After trying to reflash the unit I contacted support but they would not replace a nearly 2 year old unit. Though to be fair to them they did offer to sell me a replacement at a discount.

So with the unit dead and no chance of a replacement the ‘void if removed’ sticker was quickly discarded. Here’s the box in its faulted state with the LEDs on:

From experience the most likely thing to die in electronics is the power supply. It clearly isn’t dead here since the lights come on, but a quick check of the outputs with a multimeter showed that what should have been a +5V output was actually +2.5V. Luckily I have a sheevaplug that I use for another home project that uses an equivalent power supply so after a quick swap the Tonido was booting again.

Looking a plug computer forums it appears that there are known issues with some of these power supplies. The Tonidos original power supply was contained in a metal box, as was the original sheevaplug ones that are mentioned in the forums, but my sheevaplug has the circuit board glued to the case with protective black plastic around it. Whether that is to try to reduce the heat build up I can’t say.

Anyway the unit powered back up and the disks and mirror seem to be working fine.

root@TonidoPlug:~# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1]
1465135936 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices:
root@TonidoPlug:~#

This does mean that my plans to build a mini-ITX Atom based Solaris ZFS NAS box are now on hold. But at least so are my plans to spend about €500 on it when I can just by a £20 power supply to fix what I have!