Stormwyrm: 蛟龍

I seem to have forgotten to make a post about the home server (I named her Akiha, after the character in Tsukihime) overhaul that I recently did. As I mentioned I bought a RockPro64 and NAS case from Pine64 way back in 2019, and it has begun developing problems, which initially manifested as bad data on the SD card. It’s not really such a big surprise that this should start happening right about now and the system is due for an overhaul.

I had been experiencing random SATA instability with this system from the very beginning, and while it’s been manageable, I recently found out from someone on the Pine64 Discord that this SATA card that they sold me back in 2019 is known to have such stability issues. So I bought a new card and it should be here in a couple of weeks or so.

Akiha’s motherboard, a RockPro64, had five years’ worth of dust on it. I used one of those canisters of compressed air to blow away most of the dust and then an alcohol-based contact cleaner in spots to clean off the rest.

I also replaced the SD card with an eMMC module I’d gotten a while back for one of my other projects. I installed it with DietPi in lieu of the older Debian that had been constantly updated since. These software updates have been relatively painless so far and I’m gradually copying over what data is on the old SD card that is still useful.

I’m waiting on a new Western Digital Red 14 terabyte drive to replace those two aging WD Blue drives (3 and 4 terabytes) that have formed the core storage of the NAS. I think the drives should be fine and the seemingly incipient issues I see might largely be because of the wonky SATA card, but I don’t think I want to take any more chances. The drives are five years old after all and I’ll probably find some other use for them when this is all over. I think the expenditure of ₱26k (~400€, US$440) will be well worth it.