So last March I purchased a Synology DS1515+ and wrote about it in one of my posts “Who Shall Control My Media? Part 4 – Backend Storage” and up until this weekend, it had been performing very well.
On Saturday we went to watch a video and after hitting “Play”, the indicator that it was loading just spun. Since playback is usually almost instantaneous, and we were spinning for about 10 seconds, I decided to make sure that everything was good with the network components. I looked in our little data closet and there were no lights on the Synology. I pushed the power button. Nothing. No flickering light, no beep, nothing. I didn’t really want to mess with it at that moment, so we just decided to watch something else on Netflix.
On Sunday, I pulled the Synology down, pulled out all of the drives and removed the extra memory module I had put in it. Still dead.
I did a bit of looking and it should still be under warranty. So I’ll be documenting my experience with Synology support here.
I went through the Synology support website. I sent my first email on Monday Nov 27th at 11:45am. I received an automatic response saying that they will get back to me as soon as possible.
As of 2:30pm, I hadn’t received a response, so I decided to call their technical support line. I waited on hold for 11 minutes and 47 seconds then their system hung up on me. I’m extremely familiar with support phone systems and such, so I’m not too discouraged by that. It happens sometimes. So I call again. This time I wait on hold for 9 minutes and 9 seconds and my call gets dropped again.
I’ll try again later because I actually have things I need to do today. I’ll update this post as my attempts to contact Synology support continue.
Update Nov 28, 2017 11:02am
I still hadn’t been contacted via email yet so I decided to call them again. This time I was on hold for about 6 minutes before a nice customer service rep answered.
He was quite pleasant and asked for my ticket number that I filed online. After reading through the ticket he asked me to hold for a few moments while he got a supervisor to unlock the ticket so he could help me. After a couple questions confirming the behavior, he generated my RMA. Two minutes later it arrived in my inbox with instructions on returning the unit and gave the option for an advanced replacement unit to be shipped out (if you put in a credit card for them to put a hold on). They pay shipping both ways.
The RMA process itself was very easy once I was able to reach someone. I’ll update this again once I receive the advance replacement.
Update Dec 13, 2017 1:30pm
My “advance replacement” unit finally shipped out yesterday, and I should receive it tomorrow. I’m extremely disappointed with how long it took for them to get it out of the warehouse and on its way to me. I was told that it may take up to 7-10 days to leave the warehouse by the support person I spoke with. Synology certainly has room for improvement in the area of getting their products out.
Update Dec 14, 2017 2:30pm
The replacement unit arrived this morning. The unit was complete and well packaged. It had just about everything that a brand new unit would have in the box, power cord, ethernet cable, drive trays, screws for 2.5″ drives and a quick-start guide.
I’m happy to say that after putting my drives into the replacement, everything came back up without a hitch. There was a single warning letting me know that the unit hadn’t shut down correctly, but other than that everything is exactly as it was. All of my configurations were still there and I’m back up and running now.
