The drives in my ZimaCube are no longer working. Things have been fine for the last 6 or so months the system has been in production, but today it seems that the drives aren’t able to power up from the backplane. I’ve got 3x Seagate drives. The drives spin up when removed and connected to an external power supply. Things I’ve tried so far:
reseated the cables (both interface cables and power cable) leading to and from the expansion board
removed the NVMe tray
tested with a single drive connected to the expansion board (same behavior, drive seems to get stuck trying to initialize)
At this point, it seems like there’s something going on with it, but I’m not sure whether its the expansion board itself or the power supply. The system boots and runs normally except those drives don’t appear. What should I try next to troubleshoot the issue and/or get a warranty process started?
I will describe this problem as follows:
[Problem description.]
And I can reproduce the problem like this:
[the detailed steps to reproduce the problem.]
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And I remember I did this to my machine before the problem showed up:
[If exists, please attach the operations might be related to the issue.]
And I have tried these operations to fix it:
[The steps you might have tried.]
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[videos and screen records are best.]
[If you used CLI, then you did this by]
[What user? root? non-root?]
[In what method? Dedicated connected screen/keyboard? Web terminal? SSH?]
And here are the specs of my machine:
[the detailed specs of the machine where the problem happens]
[the specific version of the OS]
[the specific version of the Client OS]
I will describe this problem as follows:
The drives in my ZimaCube are no longer working. Things have been fine for the last 6 or so months the system has been in production, but today servers we observed that several servers that connect to volumes hosted on the ZimaCube via ISCSI were non responsive. We went to the ZimaCube and discovered that it was powered off. Upon powering it up, the system came up and booted, however none of the drives connected via the expansion board were visible to the system. The drive power lights are illuminated, but the activity lights flash in a short pattern. The drives sound as though they are unable to start spinning and continue in that cycle.
And I can reproduce the problem like this:
By turning the ZimaCube on.
And I remember I did this to my machine before the problem showed up:
Nothing. The system was functional until it wasn’t. It last performed some rsync backups to another system successfully approximately 3 hours before the server outage occurred.
And I have tried these operations to fix it:
reseated the cables (both interface cables and power cable) leading to and from the expansion board
removed the NVMe tray
tested with a single drive connected to the expansion board (same behavior, drive seems to get stuck trying to initialize)
And here are the specs of my machine:
ZimaCube Pro
64GB RAM, stock 256MB nvme
3x Seagate Exos 24TB drives
TrueNAS SCALE 25.04.2
The expansion board is receiving standby 5 V (LEDs on) but the 12 V rail required for motor spin-up is missing, unstable, or cut off by a failed power stage. Seems power delivery failure on the expansion board or its upstream PSU connection rather than drive or cable faults.
I suggest you try the following steps to determine if it is a single interface or other problems.
Tried moving the same drive to multiple bays on the expansion board
Fully powered down the ZimaCube, disconnected the power cable, waited several minutes, then restarted
I tried moving a single drive to all the bays and the behavior was the same except for a single time, one drive in bay 5 actually powered up and was recognized during one of the attempts. I couldn’t reproduce a second time or with any of the other drives.
I checked the 4 pin power connector from the motherboard to the expansion board with a multimeter and it saw around 18.8v on two of the pins. Is that right or should it be 12v?
I emailed the support address and reached out on Discord regarding this and it’s pretty frustrating not hearing anything back. I need to get this resolved as it’s dropped a storage server off our network. Can someone from Zima PLEASE assist me with getting this thing working again?
19V is normal. The backplane receives 19V and steps it down to 12V to ensure stable power delivery to the hard drives, preventing voltage drops when multiple drives are in use.
I still haven’t heard anything back and another 4 days has gone by. I appreciate your input on this thread so far, but I really have to get this system back up and running. How do I get support for this? I emailed support@icewhale.org on 8/10/25. I messaged an admin on the Icewhale Discord who said they’d reach out to the after sales manager some time last week and still nothing.
@CainZzz thank you for emailing me, but I responded to your email and haven’t heard back for over a week now. I’m really struggling with frustration over how long it’s taking to get through this issue.