Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

Back in January I repurposed my parents' old PC into a NAS. To cut the long story short, today I tried turning it on, to no avail.

It will spin up the CPU fan, maybe even the HDDs (don't quote me on that), but it won't post, it won't beep, and if I hook up a display, there will be no display output.

I tried taking out all the RAM, and turning it on like that, still wouldn't beep.

Now my suspicion is that it's either the PSU, the motherboard, or the CPU, in order of more likely to less likely. Does it seem like it's some of that?
 
The manual for the motherboard should explain it's error codes.

If it was the PSU, I doubt it would turn on again and it would smell like burnt electronics. Did it go bang?

Maybe check eBay for a replacement old motherboard (or cpu). Can use motherboard manufacturer website to find old board names to search for.
 
Last edited:
I've checked the motherboard's manual, it doesn't give much info on error codes.

I didn't hear any bangs, nor felt any smells. As a matter of fact, the LED on the motherboard which indicates power stays on.

I'm thinking of getting a replacement motherboard, if it's the culprit. But I'm still gonna see if anyone I know has a spare PSU they can lend me for testing purposes.
 
Been here before. GPU blew up PSU. Also have my replacement 2nd hand board die and had to replace it.

Sometimes you can be lucky and find a cheap bundle.

HDD docking station might be another option, but not sure if that works with RAID hard drives.
 
I wouldn't rule out the PSU yet. I've had bad PSUs do really weird stuff that would make you think it's something else. There are so many different power rails that one or two could be bad but others work fine so it makes it look like it's the mobo or something else. Try a known good PSU first, if possible, then work from there.
 
I remember having that exact same issue when I built my first PC, I forgot to plug in the 4-pin 12V connector. Those are usually 8-pin now, but a PSU rail failure would get the same symptoms. Check all the connections and make sure nothing has melted. If it's a modular PSU, make sure to check both ends.
 
Has it had any effect on the HDD that you said was dead? I hadn't seen that post until just now, I suspect the two are related in some way like maybe a rail on the PSU is dying because it just is or because the HDD was shorted in some way. Check for burning on the SATA power connector.

If it's still dead (Dave) and you have multiple HDDs of the same model you may be able to swap the boards and try that, the connection between the board and the rest of the HDD is often just sprung pins that make contact. Just take your time and ensure everything is backed up on the donor too. Alternatively you can just reach for your backup of the data from the dead HDD. I know it's not helpful to point this out after it died but I can't stress enough how important it is to have data in multiple locations. We usually learn this after data loss.

On the subject of disks and servers and having said the above, I'm taking a different approach to my server storage. Could be great, could be a disaster. After installing the two new 4TB SSDs in my main PC (which are brilliant by the way), I immediately shoved the two SATA SSDs I removed into my server and added them to the MS Storage Spaces array I have set up. It wasn't until I was in bed that I realised that probably wasn't the best idea, as I can no longer manage those SSDs via Samsung Magician and the stress of a software RAID on them concerns me.

Instead I can just use them as plain single disks. Two of the storage spaces I have set up were less than half a terabyte and aren't regularly used, which means the lack of RAID protection doesn't matter. The off-site backups I have will be up-to-date as very little changes. As it's September tomorrow it's backup time again anyway.

I plan to replace the HDDs in the server with SSDs and I think I'm going to follow this route of just using single disks, it'll get the best out of the SSDs and ensure I can monitor them properly, with the disks I remove I can then have both and on-site and off-site backup set. 8TB isn't enough for one of the storage spaces (specifically a backup of everything that's currently about 10TB) but I can split that up in a way that isn't inconvenient, in fact it'll make more sense as it'll more closely match the new storage setup in this main machine.
 
Last edited:
I'm new to TrueNAS Core, but it seems that the issue with the HDD disappeared. I will have to investigate it more, though, but it no longer throws errors in the dashboard. I will also double-check everything.

Concerning backups, I am actually thinking of getting a Blu-ray burner and some blank Blu-rays for important stuff like my photo library. I watched Snazzy Labs' video on data backups (it was a sponsored video, but very thoroughly and nicely explained), and I timestamped the part that kinda struck me as important: in case of house theft, your computer and NAS will get taken, but your Blu-ray disks? Slim chance. Also, it's a very cost-effective way of storing media, as 25GB of Blu-ray disc costs only like a couple of bucks. The only reason that's stopping me from doing that is the fact that Blu-ray writers are still kinda expensive over here. (In the video I've linked, Quinn showed a $79 USB writer, I found a very similar, if not the same model, it's like €120 here.)

Okay, I could make do with some sort of cloud backup on top of that, but I still don't know what to use. iCloud would be the best idea for my phone, but I still use a Windows desktop PC and a Windows laptop. I have thought of getting a MacBook, but for financial reasons, that will have to wait. OneDrive is okay for my uni purposes (we have like 3TB of OneDrive storage for uni), but would I personally use it? I'm not sure, I haven't investigated its strengths and weaknesses yet. Similar with Google Drive. And then there's stuff like Mega and various other lesser known cloud storage options, but I really know next to nothing about them.
 
I do backups on external 2.5" HDDs which I store in the basement. They are cheap as chips nowadays as well and you don't have to faff around with Blu-Ray discs. There are free software products (for example Veeam Agent for Windows) which can start backing up once the external HDD is connected. This way you don't have to stick to a certain schedule or remember which Blu-Ray disc you used at what date and you can just connect the HDD and have all revisions from the last x weeks/years to restore.
 
I have a similar setup, only I use 3.5" HDDs and have a 5.25" hot-swap SATA bay in my server. The disks are stored away from the house, I won't say where but they're safe from a fire or break in here.

I've never considered Blu-rays as a viable backup solution. It'll work but it'll be relatively very slow. I've had a Pioneer BDU-XD06J-UHD USB BD burner since 2017 but I've never actually written a Blu-Ray with it, I originally purchased it to watch UHD movies on my PC but that ended up being a waste of time. From what I can find the general 100GB blank BDs are 6x, which is around 27MB/s. For the price you're paying for the writer you could get some cheap WD Blue or similar 1/2TB hard drives and they'll read/write at 5x the speed.

I have an LTO4 drive and a load of LTO4 tapes here too, which is actually pretty good considering I got it all for free. It's just so damn noisy when running (the tape runs at full speed to write one strip of data before reversing) that I can't use it until I can relocate the server. One day.
 
Eye-Q said:
I do backups on external 2.5" HDDs which I store in the basement. They are cheap as chips nowadays as well and you don't have to faff around with Blu-Ray discs. There are free software products (for example Veeam Agent for Windows) which can start backing up once the external HDD is connected. This way you don't have to stick to a certain schedule or remember which Blu-Ray disc you used at what date and you can just connect the HDD and have all revisions from the last x weeks/years to restore.
Click to expand...
Tell me more about that program. I currently have a double backup. I have a ‘live’ one on a 2tb drive which has all my movies/shows, which is connected to my tv via raspberry pi, and an ‘offline’ one just for backups which just lies in a cupboard until I can be arsed to back it up.

This also means that because I am deeply disorganised, sometimes I go 6 months between backups….

I don’t have a lot of super important files so it’s not like the world will collapse if I lose it, but I do have 25 years of pictured on there, aswell as a metric shitton of music I ripped from CDs (way back in the dark ages)

Any automation/ letting the machine remember this for me would be welcome
 
In Veeam Agent for Windows Free (available as Veeam Agent for Linux Free as well) you can set the backup job to start once a specific (or one of multiple specific) HDDs is/are connected. When you connect other USB HDDs/SD cards/whatever the software doesn't start the backup job. It goes without saying that you have to remember connecting the HDD, but that can be managed by a periodic alarm on your smartphone at times when you're most likely to be at home.
 
I haven't used that but I might give it a go. I currently just use Robocopy commands in tasks to backup to the server (most mirror, some don't and therefore the backup copy contains all past files) and when I bring the case of HDDs in I use a script in Powershell ISE to go through each separate Robocopy command. I couldn't automate that at the moment but might be able to if I swap out the disks for a set of 8TB SSDs.

Amazon photos is my cloud of choice for photos, because with my Prime membership I get unlimited storage for free. As far as I know they haven't stolen any, yet. Based on the contents of my local photos disk I have about 2TB on there and it syncs automatically.
 
Adunaphel said:
My backup just happens to an Azure Blob Storage account every night with a powershell script I wrote myself.
Click to expand...
Apparently that would be about £70 a month for my approx. 18TB of everything, just for cold storage. Probably not bad but not something I could justify at the moment. :hmm:

I did just pull the trigger on my first 8TB SSD, as I'd like to organise the storage on my server as soon as possible so I can finish the backups, best to do that before I load more stuff on it.
 
Matt2000 said:
Apparently that would be about £70 a month for my approx. 18TB of everything, just for cold storage. Probably not bad but not something I could justify at the moment. :hmm:
Click to expand...
My data volume is slightly smaller than that. Plus I have 95 eur of free Azure credit per month, so it's less of a worry for me. If it were my own money, I'd definitely not use Azure Blob Storage for this.
 
www.chinaminutes.com

China Mobile develops first reconfigurable 5G RF transceiver chip 'Breaking Wind 8676'

China Mobile announced on 30th that it had successfully developed China's first reconfigurable 5G RF transceiver chip “Breaking Wind 8676.” Research and development of the RF transceiver chip, the core chip of a 5G base station, has long been dominated by other countries. Thus, the “Breaking...
www.chinaminutes.com

I just wanted to post this because of the translated name. 😂

In Chinese 破风 (Breaking Wind) sounds the same as 破封 (Breaking Blockade), so that's probably why they chose that name.
 
So the Grundig receiver and stuff I bought used last autumn, I thought had an amplifier problem as I had some high frequency static sometimes. It’s been in storage for a few months unused and I just got it set back up again and seemingly the static noise is gone. Yay. I guess poorly seated speaker cables.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top