Stormwyrm: 蛟龍

Back in 2019 I bought a RockPro64 which I have been using as a sort of NAS/home server and originally planned to use as a media centre as well, but back then I had problems installing Kodi and so had to scrub that part. I attached 7 terabytes of WD Blue hard drives (the largest I could get at the time that I could fit inside the aluminium NAS case and that was a very tight fit. I set those up as main mass storage and have so far managed to consume 6 terabytes of various random stuff. Mrs. Wyrm has proved to be an indefatigable shutterbug and about a terabyte of that is her pictures and videos, all organised by PhotoPrism.

Anyway, I noticed that the SD card that it had been using as the OS drive running Debian has begun experiencing read errors after a simple wc command failed. So now I’m having to use ddrescue to create an image of the failing SD card, which I can then write to a brand new SD card to replace the broken one. And of course, SanDisk’s 64 GB SD card just has to be slightly smaller than the 64 GB SD card that they sold me six years ago, about 65536 bytes less, and so I can’t just dump the SD card data from the recovered data and needed to do some black magic with gdisk to be able to recover something. Luckily, there’s plenty of headroom on the 64GB drive and the top part is not in use. It finally booted properly. What a huge pain. Now I need to do validation of packages to make sure that any corrupted data is restored. Debsums looks like it can do this.

Might be a good idea to think of upgrades to the system now. One quick one will be to use eMMC modules instead of SD cards, so as to minimise this happening in the future. That will probably necessitate a reinstall and rebuild of the OS. Probably long overdue though the distro still seems to be getting updates. Next would be to replace the drives… And this might be a bit complicated. It seems to be hard to get large SSDs out here. A 4TB SSD (and I will need two of these) seems to cost upwards of US$500, and so to upgrade the whole thing to use such drives is going to be seriously prohibitive. I cannot find bigger solid state drives anywhere online or offline. Meanwhile, it looks like for less than the cost of one of these 4 TB SSDs I can get a 10 TB WD Black or a 14 TB WD Purple. This is probably just superstition on my part but from experience Western Digital has been much more reliable than other brands. After two lemons in a row from Seagate that left me with serious data loss (one reason why there’s a gap in my pictures from 2017 and 2008) I’ve sworn them off… Though I should probably try looking at Backblaze’s hard drive failure stats and other similar statistics to guide my future purchases based on hard data rather than confirmation bias.