New Linux OS on bricked MCH

We have frequent ugly power cuts where I live, and despite a mains surge protector, I have now lost a second 4Tb MCH (permanent red light).

I therefore want to use an SSD instead of a HDD, believing that an SSD will be less prone to failure, but a 4Tb SSD is too expensive for me. I do have two large capacity USB drives. One is my old MCH backup and is now connected to my BT home hub and acts as my replacement NAS. But I now need to have a backup for this, and was wondering if I could attach a 128GB SSD to the MCH with a linux OS (I am familiar with Linux) to routinely perform the backup operation for me. I could of course just connect the second USB drive to my laptop and do the backups ths way, but this requires the laptop to be on and I don’t want to have to undertake the daily manual intervention.

I would greatly appreciate any comments on whether this is possible, and if so, how to set it up.

Thanks.

@CHARLES_WALMSLEY

Have you looked at the User Manual?

User Manual: My Cloud Home and My Cloud Home Duo (westerndigital.com)

I’m not sure how the User Manual helps. The MCH HDD is dead. I just want something to run in the background to perform backups. Nothing apart from the OS needs to be stored on the device.

I could use an old laptop or PC, but I don’t have anything with USB 3.0 or anything that is suitable as an always-on device. In theory the MCH should do the job. I thought I could simply use the ethernet port to connect to my LAN and the USB port to connect to a 4Tb USB backup drive. I would then use the OS to mirror the USB drive on my BT homehub to the SB drive attached to the MCH. Obviously I would have to use SSH to set things up.

I now realise that the solid red light does NOT necessarily mean the HDD has failed!!! I have just discovered that the red light goes on when there is no network connection. The manual does not appear to indicate this. It only says that a solid red light means a HDD fault.

After the power cut, my network switcher failed to turn on. Don’t know why. This meant that the MCH didn’t have a network connection and so the red light came on. All is now working again. I just have the faff of putting everything back the way it was.

The brick is flying again!