More On Morons

Here is a tip that could save you a nasty shock and a burnt finger or two. When you disassemble that old gadget, say a Buffalo Linkstation NAS that’s getting a bit too cramped and needs a bigger hard drive, make sure you don’t short out the enormous capacitor on the power supply that such devices have. Not only might you damage the device irreparably by causing a nice shiny spark to leap across the circuit board and flash (in the wrong way) the main chip, you could (if you did the shorting with your fingers) end up with a quite nasty shock and a burn to the hand.

This was my fate yesterday I have to confess. I had hoped to swap out the old 300 Gb from my Buffalo NAS and replace it with a new half terabyte 7200rpm drive; I say half terabyte, it actually works out as 456Gb when formated, which is a bit of a blow. Thankfully, it was only my hand that got damaged (twice), leaving me with two little white burn marks and the shakes after repeated attempts to get the thing apart. For more on disassembly of a Buffalo Linkstation check out this site. There are lots of hidden screws and flanges to cope with.

Meanwhile, back to my upgrade and another tip! Make sure you use a completely unformated hard drive for such upgrades. If you try to install a formated disk, the Buffalo’s firmware won’t operate and you’ll end up with the proverbial brick. Slotting the old drive back in then leaves you with a second brick until you re-flash the drive, although I didn’t work that out until after the second shocking incident.

Anyway, I’m back where I started - a 320Gb (or is it 300?) Buffalo LS and a spare 500Gb drive that now needs an enclosure to allow me to bring it into the network via RJ45 or USB. But once, it’s all up and running I should have a terabyte of storage space. That’s an awful lot of site backups I could.