Fixing a Synology DS1515+ not powering on

A few days ago my old Synology DS1515+ that I gave a friend wouldn’t power up. Press the power button and not a single thing would happen, no fans or lights would come on – not even for a second.

I started looking around and found there to be three common issues with several of the DSxx15 units:

  1. Dead motherboard battery
  2. Intel Atom C2000 bug
  3. Dead B847B transistor

Good stuff right?! Well luckily it’s not nearly as bad as it might sound at first and all three are pretty easy to fix.

Items needed to repair the DS1515

The first thing I did was remove the cover from the Synology NAS and tested the power supply and everything checked out fine on the PSU.

Next I moved on to the transistor since it was the next closest and easiest item to get to. Using a multi-meter and setting it to 10 AMP I put the leads on the center and bottom pins as shown here:

Synology DS1515+ NAS transistor
Set multi-meter to 10amp and check these pins

The good news is, immediately the DS1515+ powered on. So the next step was to remove the motherboard from the chassis so I could de-solder the old transistor and solder a new transistor in it’s place and I figured while I had it removed I would go ahead and address the other two known issues, more as a precautionary and so I wouldn’t have to take it apart again.

Below is a “map” of the points of interest on the Synology DS1515+ motherboard that we’ll be focusing in on.

Once I had the motherboard removed from the chassis. I replaced the factory CR1220 battery with a new Energizer CR1220 battery.

Next up I solder the 100 ohm resistor in place as shown below. This resistor is said to fix the Intel Atom C2000 bug and the same fix that was being done by Synology back when these units still in their warranty period.

Now it was time to actually fix the root cause of this whole thing and that was to replace the failed transistor. Using a heat gun and some small pliers I removed the bad transistor.

With the old transistor removed I soldered on a new BC847B transistor just as the old one had been installed.

Finally, the only thing left to do it to reassemble the the NAS. Everything checked out fine and is fully operational now.

All in all the total cost was around $15! A lot better option than buying a brand new unit.

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