Well, here we go. A bit botched but I'm not going to shelf that until I get those SMD caps. This needs to get off my bench.

Very interesting! Before, the monitor would know it's getting a signal but the image would stay black. The computer would sit a bit and then access the floppy drive shortly, beep twice and then do nothing. Still no image. My assumption was, that the boot process is completely silent if the system lost its configuration, and it requires the configuration diskette before it will even know it has graphics.

I was wrong. The black screen was a function of the dead caps in the floppy drive. Huh.

Floppy drive works again!

I love this sound.

Radio Shaek 2 😂😂

I've become super paranoid about my power consumption lately and hence never run my nas anymore unless I really need to do a backup or retrieve something. Which has caused my data to fracture across my computers and it's become a real pain. Needless to say I've also been slacking with backups.

Now, my idea was to keep the nas running 24/7 but without the raid array of spinning rust and use a single SSD instead. With rsync noscripts to periodically spin up the drives and copy the data over. However, even that would cost a non negligible amount of money with how crazy rates have gotten. I haven't actually measured the power consumption of my nas yet, so far I'm only relying on internet information. It's an older unit, HP Microserver N54L. x86 based with a soldered on Turion II CPU. The advantage would be its flexibility. I could also put a decent sound card in and use it to play music on my stereo. Something I've meant to do ever since I bought this thing eons ago.

Nowadays though, I would very much like to run a very lean arm system. If any of you know a decently priced board for diy nas solutions, tell me in the comments. A pi4 runs about 80€, IF I could get one. But that doesn't have any SATA ports. There are hats for it, for about 70€, but I kinda doubt the performance is going to be great.

I have a first gen Banana Pi, which does have a SATA port. And looking it up, there have been recent advances made to improve the performance of that.

I've also been rummaging around in my boxes and found an older ZyXEL nas. Performance won't be great with that either, but that's okay. It's mostly meant for documents and programming work and not media. I decided to look at the ZyXEL first.

ZyXEL NSA325 v2.
Seems to be from around 2014. Runs a Marvell Armada 370 88F6707 ARM5 @ 1.2 GHz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb flash. Gigabit Ethernet and SATA II.

Very under powered by today's standards. But maybe it suffices? Let's check it out, flash openwrt onto it and run some benchmarks.

That PCIe looking connecter is just the connector for the SATA port breakout board.

Oh man they could've really cleaned up their flux residue. That's stock.

It boots up, that's a start.

Alright, I think I'm back from the dead. Been a bit stressful here and I didn't have the patience to post

Now, this project turned out to be a total pain in the neck. Not because of the hardware, but because of openWRT

Here's how to get openWRT onto it:

- write down your MAC address as you will need to restore it later
- find the appropriate firmware and bootloader images. For my hardware that's zyxel_nsa325-squashfs-factory.bin and u-boot-nsa325/u-boot.kwb and place them on a storage medium like a thumb drive or ssd
- hook onto the serial console using one of those TTL to USB UARTs

- interrupt the boot process to get into the boot loader

- the bootloader is a modular system. in order to use parts of the hardware, you have to load the subsystems for it. so, if you use a thumb drive, do

usb reset

- to use a sata drive do
ide restart

- check if your NAND contains any bad blocks within the area that's going to hold the bootloader and firmware
nand bad