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.
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.