matthewkleinmannSo many USB drives! Decades worth. From the first one I got to the last one I got. All with different FS types on them. Lots of good old stuff. Old radio shows, old pictures, old projects. God only knows what.
So how to unify them. I had dug out an old netgear slug that I had been playing with running Asterisk on 15 years ago and with some help from a nice guy on the slug forum I got it back to the last version of the stock firmware which should support ntfs but on a USB drive, but instead it kept wanting to format my drive. Urg. I finally went as far as to take the drive out and plug it into my computer to verify it had files on it and it was ntfs formatted, and it was clean. All of the above were true. I am too old and tired to fight with an obsolete slug. The slug project ended a long time ago and other things have gotten much better in the meantime.
So, out with the slug and in with a thinterm, a Wyse CXO to be exact. See more here: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/cx0/. These can be had for under $20 on eBay. Much better. I can run TinyCore Linux (http://tinycorelinux.net) on it. TinyCore Linux is an incredible project and the folks behind it are super helpful. In fact I learned a lot about that the night before moving my SO's old websites over to anotehr thin term. So with that fresh in my mind... Time to try to make a nas sort of thing.
This one was a bit easier as it is totally inside the firewall but I already had the tech down to install ssh and do it all cert based so I can work on it from the comfort of my notebook and not in an unheated closet. Big plus there.
This turned out to be brainlessly simple. I may make it a bit more seamless at some point but I kind of like how it is now. Install the ntfs-3g package, set that up to run on boot. Set it up to mount all the drives (the term has 4 USB ports. and it should work with a hub on one or more of them...), set up samba. Literally that simple.
Now I have one unc address I can go to that has a bunch of sd's that I can cd into and there lie all my old goodies. I am happy as a clam. The only last thing I am pondering is taking an old PC case that I have that has 7 usable bays in it and moving all the hdds from the USB to that and running them from the old power supply in he pc case. I think that may be more efficient. Perhaps buy a bunch of the sata to usr and pata to usb dongles on ebay to put in the box too. Than I can get more disks for the external boxes and start the cycle over again!
I spent last night on the disk box. This was an old PC. I took the motherboard out. I took all the drives out. I gutted the thing except for a pair of wires from the power switch and a pair of wires that go to the LED behind the power switch. I will re-use them in place.
Next it was time to modify the power supply. This turned out to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Actually it required two power supplies. I wanted 8 SATA power hoses coming out of it. It had 4. I also did not want all the stray wires coming out from for the board and CPU power. So, take the first supply apart. This was the nicer of the two. With the supply apart I was able to twist it around so I had access to the bottom of the board. On this model supply, all the same color wire from a connector set go into one big hole. The wires have a metal crimp around them that goes into the hole and the entire thing is soldered to the board.
It was soon apparent that none of my pencil irons were going to get near hot enough to deal with that solder joint. Time to run out to the shop and get my 1960's vintage WEN soldering gun kit. That made pretty easy work of it and I was able to pull out the bunches of wires for the motherboard connector and the CPU connector. Everything but the disk power wires and the green power on wire.
Next, the other supply came apart. This one died for it's disk wires. Sad but true. I have 6 slots in the case but the disk wires were all nicely connected with those metal crimp on things that I figured what the heck, let's just take all of them.
Once the connectors were harvested it was time to put them in the proper holes on the other supply. The holes had to be cleaned out well and one of them took a bit of reaming with one tine of a pair of needle nose pliers, but I was able to get the +12 +5 and Ground wires in the proper holes. I used the trusty old soldering gun to solder them back in and proceeded to put the power supply back together..
The inside of the case looks great. Very clean with just the SATA power wires sticking out. For now I am still using the drives in their "portable" boxes with their ice cubes, but soon I will move them all into the new box now that the box is ready.
For now though I am happy. This is simple and low power. It would not hold up with multiple people banging on it, but truthfully I don't think it will ever be happen with just the two of us. I have tried watching videos from it and they play fine. More than I can ask for.
Pictures to follow but they look a lot like any other wyse thin term sitting next to some USB disks. Pretty uneventful.
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Around a year down the road and a few changes.
1) I got rid of all of the old drives and the computer case and modified power supply.
2) I replaced all of the old drives with one new 6TB drive in a nice enclosure.
3) I got a second enclosure that looks like a toaster. It is pretty cool, you can just pop a drive in and out, and it has a spring loaded flap for aligning 2.5" drives in the slot, which will also accommodate 3.5" drives.
There were a few hicks along the way to nirvana.
The first one is that not all USB to SATA interfaces will work with high capacity drives. My initial idea was to re-cycle the nicest USB case I had for this project, but the electronics were outdated. On the plus side I was able to get an enclosure that I like even better.
The second issue was the standard fdisk will not work on really large drives. I wound up having to get GPT and use gdisk. That didt the trick, and I now have one big partition that has all the stuff from all of my older drives as well as a lot of new stuff, and I still have some growing room. And I still have most of the old disks that I can plug into the toaster enclosure as backups.
Overall, I am totally happy with this solution. I have lots of space, it is easy to plunk a disk in to make copies of stuff too big for a USB stick, and best of all the total power consumption seems to be around 40W, and it takes up very little physical space.
Around another year down the road...
I went to copy something off the NAS and the big disk was missing. Utto. After some probing around I figured out the big disk was not spinning. When I turned it off and back on it made some sounds like it wanted to spin but could not quite muster it. Not good. I tried the disk on a regular PC power supply and it spun right up. Yahoo for that one.
I was torn on the disk box. I figured perhaps get a different one, but I was not sure if I would have issues if I used another SATA to USB bridge. In the disk case I have both are on the same board and one of the things I liked about this disk case is that is does not have a big ice cube or wall wart. It takes a regular 120V power wire. I better get the same box again. So I looked it up and got a new one ordered.
While waiting I took the old one apart and took the gutz out out of it. There were two small boards in it, a power supply and the SATA to USB bridge.
There was well under 5V coming out of the power supply. Looking at the board, none of the caps looked bulged. I did more probing and across the main filter cap, the one right after the bridge that goes to the AC line, the voltage was varying wildly. That got me very suspect of the main filter cap.
The power supply only had a few electrolytic in it and my parts place has a $5 minimum, so I ordered up all new caps for it. When they came in and I got around to changing them, it was obvious that the main filter cap was in fact bad. The top looked but there was a dark sticky spot under where the cap was. I replaced all the caps anyway, I had them and the iron was hot and I had my head gear on, so what the heck..
I put another drive that I did not care about in the case and fired it up and she spun right to life. Yippie! I was able to mount it and get at it from the NAS. All good. I spun it down and replaced it with the good drive and the NAS is back up and happy. I am out a few bucks for the other enclosure that did show up a few days later, but that is cool. It is nice to know that the power supply in these thigs is pretty easy to fix and that I have a spare if I need it. Back on the air and running strong...
Fast forward a year again. The enclosures and drives are holding up fine, in fact everything is working peechy keene, but... I harvest stuff from reddit and the bbc every day, this is all automated and the tools of choice are all python based. The old wyse thin term just had enough space to fit tiny core and the various things it took to make the project go. They had a 128MB (yes megabyte) ssd and one 512MB memory module in them. Kind of an odd set up having 4X more memory than disk space. Plus two USB 2 ports and the rest USB1 1. 100MB networking. It was sadly starting to show it's age.
A friend brought over a few HP t520's. These are 64 bit, dual core (amd -yuck but hey for free...) units, they take M.2 SSD drives that are common and small ones are inexpensive, and common memory. They are weird about their power supplies though. I got one of them up and going with a 128GB SSD (Ah, breathing room), and I am now investigating if tiny core (actually pure core, the 64 bit flavor) can do UASP. They have 2 USB 3 ports and GB networking. Nice boxes. And with the sizable SSD I should be able to do my harvesting right from the machine itself and that should be faster and put less load on the internal network. This is going to be a bit in coming, but I think it will retain a lot of the charm of the first one, with some horsepower. The only thing I am not super happy about is the old term and disks came in at around 40W full tilt. The new term solo requires a 65W supply. If my pc experiments have taught me anything though is the actual consumption will likely be a lot less. My old desktop with 2 big sata drives and 2 dvd writers would clock in at about 90W full tilt. I am hoping this will be more like 20W and the drives will be near the same as they were..