Bill_S wrote:
We forwarded this thread to the product group. I don’t know if they have reproduced it or not. I’m sure they’re looking into it, but it may take a bit to get a response.
If they need more information, they will private message. Please respond to your private messages, if you don’t, this issue may not go any further with them. This is happening a lot to us, where we pm users for more information, but nobody responds.
Some things to try, and/or make sure of, or be aware of:
- Do not place the router inside a cabinet. It will collect heat.
- Do not stack other devices on top it. It will collect heat.
- If you’ve done a firmware update on it, you may want to do a factory reset.
- The fan doesn’t kick in until the chipset inside actually hits 68 degrees Celsius. That’s 157 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The fan doesn’t hit full speed until the temperature hits over 75 degrees Celsius.
- The fan is extremely quiet. If it is running, it pulls air in from the top and blows it out the bottom of the router.
If you really think the router is overheating, are the leds blinking? Have you lost all connectivity to the Wifi, Usb, and Ethernet? That would be happening if it is truly overheating.
However, if you are experiencing drop offs, then that could be due to something else - which we are also looking into.
1,2) The router is sitting on top of my desk with nothing over, under (besides the laptop cooling pad), or around it within a foot (the usb hdd I have been testing with has a 6’ cable and is on the other side of my desk).
- After having my initial issues with the router locking up under really any kind of load even light loads, I came to the forums and found this tid bit of info. I also tried downgrading the firmware and then reapplying updates in a row without skipping any as that was also reported to help. I cannot confirm nor deny that doing so really helped at all as my unit would still lockup under light loads prior to my cd case and cooling pad tests.
4,5,6) At one point I propped the unit up on it’s side so I could see the fan and watch if it came on. I only saw it ever spin once, and even then it was spinning so slow I could count the revolutions. During this test, the router only dropped out after copying around 2gb of data via ethernet to the usb hdd I had hooked up to port 1. As soon as windows reported the drive was unavailable, I felt the bottom of the router and it was hot enough for me to not leave my hand on it.
I have never had all the LEDs blink in sync like the manual says they should if it overheats, but if you read my previous posts on this thread, something inside is definitely overheating since just propping it up on a cd case helped a lot and then adding a laptop cooler totally fixed 99% of the issues (only remaining is the DLNA dropping out after 6 days which I suppose I can live with since it just required a power cycle and no files were deleted/corrupted). As you mentioned, when it used to lock up on me, first the USB would become unavailable, then the interface I was copying over would drop out followed shortly by any remaining interfaces (ie: if I was using wifi, it would go and then LAN or the other way around if I was using the LAN to copy), including the wd dashboard, and finally the wd quick view would stop reporting the N900 on my network. This would all happening within about 10~15 seconds of the USB drive failing to report so seeing a delayed drop-out on some devices could easily be explained my local buffered cache on those devices (my wii is usually the last device to say it lost the internet while watching a movie). Where is the thermal sensor(s) at and how often are they polled by the chipset to determine the fan speed? Could it simply be that where the sensor is at is not getting that hot, but some other part is (such as any onboard cache/ram or UARTs) which is then causing the onboard firmware/software to crash when it goes to poll these other devices inside the unit?
As a side note, I find it interesting that you guys are trying to pull cool air in from the top and exhaust it out the bottom since that is inherently backwards from how typical heat convection works. It would seem to me to be more efficient to simply turn the fan around and pull cool air from below and push it up in the direction the heat is naturally trying to flow than force it go in the opposite direction.
Also, how do you check your PMs? I have looked under my profile and poked around a few other places and have yet to see where you would even check for them.
