Now I needed to get access to an Ext4 Linux partition from a Windows 10 Pro machine. And, most important, an 1892 Gb Ext4 primary partition reported with status "correct". The 2 Tb disk featured several small Ext2 and Ext4 formatted partitions. I opened the disk administration utility available in Windows 10 and there it was. I proceeded to mount the drive in a USB HD enclosure and connected it to one USB 3.0 port in my desktop workstation. “But,” I thought “maybe the drive had survived…” I replaced it with few hopes and plugged the NAS for the last time. The SoC had a CR2032 battery, like the ones that motherboards use to help keep their BIOS in the desired setup. Cavium was acquired by the Marvell technology Group in 2018, and now their creation had joined its maker in the great beyond. The circuit board was in fact an SoC that could run Linux. The NAS innards were disappointing: an aluminum housing contained the drive, which was connected to a small circuit board that contained an Econa CN33425 ARM CPU made by Cavium. I had to break the brackets to get to the drive. The Seagate Central housing is not designed for repairs: it is made of some plastic molded pieces that are joined by brackets.
So, I decided to give Seagate a chance and after doing some googling I found a tutorial on how to get access to the physical drive inside the NAS. But hard disk failures really upset me, since that there is a chance that however methodic we were with our backup policy, something invaluable may be lost forever.
Luckily, I always keep another local backup and an additional couple of backups in the cloud (one in OneDrive and another in Google Drive), so the pdf was still available. Well, the Seagate Central NAS died silently in the middle of the night, I found it already dead the next afternoon when I was looking for an old pdf file which contained some obscure technical information about solenoid valves. Sudden, tragic demises just put you out of circulation with no chance to settle pending issues and leaving your loved ones in angst (or not…).
You can redact your will, put your papers in order, say goodbye to your loved ones, and just expect whatever you think happens afterward. Orderly deaths give you the benefit of being prepared for the event. Like ourselves, the way it dies can be either in an orderly fashion or in a sudden, tragic event. Having worked as a systems administrator in a small company in the 90s, I am aware of the life fact that eventually, every hard disk will fail. Then I started to dump on it photos, music, movies, documents, and whatever kind of data that was not of recurrent use. It was a sleek alternative to a USB external disk, having a 1 Gb Ethernet interface port, which I connected to one of the GB Ethernet switches of my SOHO network. A few years ago, (well, exactly 5 years 4 months and 3 days, according to the Sea Tools software, supplied by Seagate) I got a 2 TB Seagate Central external hard disk.