it started as a routine maintenance day for the UGREEN DXP2800. The NAS had been running perfectly on firmware version 1.16.0.0089. An update to 1.17.0.0095 went smoothly, but right after it finished, another prompt appeared: an upgrade to version 1.18.1.0098. The app estimated a breezy 5 to 15 minutes. The system rebooted, finished the installation, and loaded the login screen.
That is when the chaos started.
Almost immediately upon logging in, a grim “pool error” popped up on the dashboard. Down on the physical unit, the Disk 1 indicator light glowed an angry orange/red for about 30 to 40 seconds, briefly turned white, and then reverted to a slow, steady orange blink accompanied by intermittent beeping. According to the hardware manual, a slow flashing orange disk light signifies a disk failure or serious drive error.
The Hardware Lockup
Assuming it was a physical seating issue, the immediate reaction was to power the unit down, pull the drives out, wait 10 minutes, securely reinstall them, and boot it back up. But the orange light and the beeping returned.
Trying to gracefully shut down the NAS via the UGOS Pro app resulted in the first major anomaly: the app displayed a successful shutdown screen and disconnected, but the physical NAS was still humming along, fully powered on.
Next came the manual override. Pressing and holding the physical power button on the chassis for over 10 seconds—a universal command for a hard shutdown—did absolutely nothing. The entire power management controller had locked up. The NAS was frozen in a low-level hardware loop, deaf to software commands and physical button presses alike. The only way out was to yank the power cord directly from the wall.
Diagnostics and S.M.A.R.T. Discoveries
After unplugging the machine and letting it sit completely dead for 20 minutes to drain the motherboard’s capacitors, the drives were reseated one more time. Upon plugging it back in and booting up, the system finally responded.
It was time to interrogate Disk 1 using the internal S.M.A.R.T. tools.
⚬ The Rapid Test: Initiating a Rapid test—which checks basic mechanical and electrical indicators—returned a completely “Normal” status.
⚬ Deep S.M.A.R.T. Attributes: Digging into the raw data revealed the truth. The Reallocated_Sector_Ct (ID 5) sat at a normalized value of 93, indicating some historical wear but nothing near a failure threshold. More importantly, the UDMA_CRC_Error_Count (ID 199) was a perfect 200, proving that the SATA link and physical connection backplane were completely clean.
The hard drive was not broken.
The firmware was lying.
The Plot Twist: Flawless Operation
To test the system’s actual stability, the NAS was left alone to settle and run a heavy background task: generating media thumbnails. It handled the workload without a single hiccup.
Later, turning the NAS on remotely via the app provided the ultimate proof. For a solid 20 to 30 minutes, the network drives mounted perfectly. Files were accessed, folders were browsed, and data was read flawlessly. If the drive were actually experiencing a mechanical failure or a collapsed storage pool, this seamless data access would have been impossible.
When it was time to turn the unit off, initiating the shutdown remotely from the app finally worked. The network and disk lights went dark, though the main power button blinked white for an extended period—a sign that the NAS was painstakingly flushing its processes and slowly shutting down.
The Final Verdict The sequence of events painted a clear picture. The consecutive jumps from 1.16 to 1.17, and immediately to 1.18.1.0098, introduced a severe software bug. The new firmware was bungling its drive bay initialization and power state polling. It was getting caught in a false-positive loop, throwing up an orange warning light and freezing the motherboard’s power management, despite the hardware being in perfect working order.
STILL FACING SAME ISSUE, ALL TEST ARE OK, ITS FIRMWARE DONT UPDATE