Introduction
10/02/2024
I considered replacing the 3T Seagate Personal Cloud NAS that did not survive storage but then I had a few more thoughts about what to do with it. I am convinced hard drive is okay so I could simply re-use the drive in my PC or I could remove the NAS electronics and replace it with a Raspberry Pi and rebuild it as a NAS.
After some consideration I thought it would be a waste to put it in my PC and that the Raspberry Pi option probably wasn't going to work out as easily as it sounds - I would need to fit a dual power supply, a USB to SATA interface and a Raspberry Pi into the limited space left by the NAS electronics.
So my decision is to convert the drive to USB3 then I can plug it into one of the other Seagate NAS and share the drive from there. I could do this by buying either a USB3 caddy or a USB to SATA converter.
I set about striping down the NAS down to it's three basic parts, the circuit board, the drive and the case.
![](/USBtoSATA/s_01_SeagateNAS.jpg)
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With the circuit board out there is plenty room the converter I chose:
![](/USBtoSATA/12_SeagateNAS.jpg)
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and I can re-use the NAS power supply.
I installed the USB to SATA adaptor in the case beside the drive which turns out to be just the right size.
![](/USBtoSATA/s_16_SeagateNAS.jpg)
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plugging it into a PC and running the administrative Tools I started to remove the existing partitions and reformating the drive to NTFS.
![](/USBtoSATA/19_SeagateNAS.jpg)
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Everything was going well, the drive seemed to be working ok but as soon as I tried to copy a file to it it just hung there doing nothing..so the drive is faulty after all. Just to prove thet I looked out an old 160GB SATA drive and it worked very well with transfer speeds of 65-70MB/s.
![](/USBtoSATA/s_21_SeagateNAS.jpg)
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OK, so the 3T drive is faulty, that means that the NAS circuit board is probably working. Looking into rebuilding the Seagate OS on a new drive seems not to be an option. Single bay Seagate Personal Cloud NAS drives are not supported for HDD replacement, more research is required.
In the mean time I have a lot of useless parts until I remembered I had a box with old USB 2 drives, maybe I could cannibalise one of them if they were new enough to have SATA interfaces and of course still worked.
![](/USBtoSATA/s_25_SeagateNAS.jpg)
Opening my newest retired drives (c2010) revealed two 2T SATA drives - perfect, I could use one in the Seagate case.
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Once assembled, as above, the drive transfer (write) speed tested at around 100MB/s. Limitations coming into effect now may be the network and source HDD speeds.
Next up is to connect it to my working Seagate NAS drive. I could simply plug it into the NAS USB socket but I'm now thinking of using the other old 2T drive so I'm going to use a powered USB3 hub making it possible to connect up to four drives.
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Looking at the labels on the drives they require 0.85A @ 5V which is more than most 10 year old USB ports could supply so I have selected a powered hub rated 3A @ 5V which will be good enough for up to three 3.5" drives.
![](/USBtoSATA/s_27_SeagateNAS.jpg)
The drive and hub installed at the right hand side of the upper shelf, I'll find a better location for the USB Hub.
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Moving on to the second 2T drive, I thought one of the USB2 caddies would be suitable for conversion to USB3. I removed the circuit board and cut out a hole just the right size for the USB3 to SATA adaptor to slide in. I sat the drive on top of the other one then mounted the USB hub on the side of the cabinet. Now I have to work out my backup strategy.
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