It's interesting and a little disappointing to hear comments about Meridian's lack of diagnostic information. I seem to recall being told when I purchased my system in 2013 that if there were any errors on the MD600 hard drives I would be contacted by Meridian to advise me. I have to wonder how long my failed hard drive had been inoperative. It makes me very glad that I have two backup hard drives and also backup to my NAS.

My MD600 and MS600 are normally powered up 24/7. The last time they would have been switched off deliberately would probably have been in November 2019 when I was away on holiday, but we did have a reasonably lengthy power outage about 3 weeks ago. My PC is shut down at the end of each day. The router is occasionally rebooted if there are communication difficulties with other devices. All of this makes me think that the hard drive had probably not been inoperative for long. Still don't know why temporarily unplugging the ethernet cable from the MS600 would have suddenly caused Configure and Control:PC not to work. None of the LEDs on the front of the MD600 were indicating a failure.

I've never tried Seagate Tools for checking hard drives. Would I be able to use it if I put a hard drive in my Icy Box and connect that to my PC with a USB cable? Is it reasonably straightforward to use? I note that there are various types of testing that can be done. What do most people use? J.

Control:PC, MS600 & MD600, Audio Note M5 pre-amp, Conquest power amps, Magnum Dynalab MD108 tuner, Duevel Bella Luna speakers. Approx 2000 albums on Sooloos - wide range of genres.