Internal Drive won't stay connected

Support Nucleus Support
1

I have a two-year-old Nucleus + (purchased as a Xmas gift from Music Direct on 11/21/2018 and put into service on 12/26/2018) which no longer recognizes the internal Seagate Barracuda SSD drive I installed when I set it up…it worked great for a while, but after about 4 months it would no longer play any of the files on the drive. Or I should say it would play a file for anywhere between 2 and 30 seconds before it would stop. At that point the drive was not visible when checking the storge section on the Roon control software (run from a fanless Microsoft Surface). Oddly, when I first boot up the Nucleus+ the internal drive is accessible from another networked computer…I can view the files but I cannot move files on or off of the drive from the remote computer…until Nucleus+ attempts to use the drive, then it is no longer accessible or visible from any other network device. I suspect a problem with the hard drive controller, as the drive itself is working fine. I got tired of fiddling with it, so I disabled it and reverted back to using my Seagate NAS. It has been working flawlessly ever since, using the network drive (which unfortuantly can be noisy from time to time). I now shut down the Nucleus+ between listening sessions and reboot as needed. I don’t know if leaving the Nucleus+ on 24/7 contributed to the internal drive communication failure (excessive heat can be a problem). Please advise…I’d love to be able to use the internal drive again.

P.S.
Although I don’t think the rest of my system has anything to do with the problem my Nucleus+ feeds a PS Audio Direct Stream DAC with the Bridge II and the latest software updates > PS Audio BHK Pre-amp > PS Audio BHK Stereo 250 Power Amp — all powered from a PS Audio PerfectWave Power Plant 10 — Focal Sopra 3 speakers.
All interconnects and speaker cables are from Kimber Select. My network uses a Linksys AC3000 router and Linksys 5 port switch. There are currently 20,892 tracks on the internal Seagate drive.

3

Hi @Tom_Hawley,

Can you reproduce the issue and give a timestamp for when the drive disappears? We’ll enable diagnostics and take a look. Thanks!

4

Hi Dylan,

Thanks for your response.

First I disabled my NAS and enabled the Internal drive. After it finished its registration of the tracks on the drive, I attempted to play a 16/44.1 track. I got the message “Playback was interrupted because a track failed to load”.

I rebooted and waited about 1 min.

The first file I played after the reboot (16/44.1) played all the way through (3:00 min) then the 2nd file did not start and I got the message " File is loading slowly. This may indicate a hardware performance problem".
The player skipped to the next track and I got the message “Too many failures. Stopping playback”

I attempted to start the next track and I got the message " Playback was interrupted because a track failed to load."

I shut down the Nucleus+ and waited about 5 min and rebooted.

This time the 1st track (24/96) played all the way through. (4 min)
Track 2 played for 1min 41sec (of a 4min track) and jumped to track 3 with the following message “File is loading slowly. This may indicate a hardware performance problem”.
Track 3 played all the way through. (3:53 min)
Track 4 stopped at 3:45 (of a 3:57min track) and jumped to track 5 with the message “Playback was interrupted because a track failed to load.”
Track 5 would not play and displayed the message “Too many failures. Stopping playback”

The drive did not disappear but when I tried to copy files onto it from a networked computer I was only able to copy two albums before it would not allow me to write to the drive.

Thanks again for your help.

5

Thanks, @Tom_Hawley. I’ve enabled diagnostics and we’ll take a look at what’s going on here! Please note that our QA team’s queue is a little longer than typical at the moment, but I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!