Leaderboard

Rossmann said they couldn't do anything with the drive, which REALLY surprised me, so they referred me to Gillware Data Recovery. I need to talk to them first before sending the drive in to make sure the attempt will be a reasonable sum, which I'll try to do tomorrow. I guess the moral of the story is not to futz around with diskpart unless you know for damn sure you know what you're doing. I received the Terramaster. It looks like a typical grey internal drive cage, just a little wider and without any mounting points. It uses screw-in drive sleds, unlike the Sabrent, which is a PITA, but c'est la vie. However, it also came with some paper-like inserts that go in-between the drives and the bottom of the sleds, which I've never seen. The boxed instructions don't say why they're required and the online product guide doesn't even mention them, so I can only guess their purpose (electrical insulators?). Bizarre. It also doesn't have an internal PSU as such, but came with a laptop-style 12V barrel plug brick power converter. Unlike the Sabrent, the drives sit vertically, which makes me a bit uncomfortable (I might lay it on its side). There is only one USB-C connector. There has been some talk on the Terramaster forums about people needing a powered USB hub with this unit. I don't know why this would be required when directly attached to the USB-C port on a motherboard, but maybe that's been my problem all along. If so, I'll consider slitting my wrists later. I'm in the process of long-formatting three 18 TB Seagate Exos simultaneously. If that passes, I'll continue trying to rebuild the pool. This is my last attempt at doing so. If the formats fail, I'm giving-up, at least for awhile. Maybe in the far-flung future I'll get a proper tower with a 10,000 watt PSU and stuff it with drives, but I really, REALLY hope the Terramaster comes through. I have confirmed that Windows recognizes all six drives, but the Sabrent did the same until I started encountering those drive dropouts, so longevity will determine the winner. More to come!

I haven't heard from Rossmann yet. If I don't get a reply by Wednesday, I'll voice call them. I did order the 6-bay Terramaster, which should be here tomorrow. If/when I'm satisfied it's running as advertised, I'll rebuild the pool and copy over what I can. Assuming everything goes smoothly (har har), I'll reinstall everything and restore from config backups, which I've been holding-off on doing until I can figure things out. I really, REALLY hope the Terramaster "just works". Since it only accepts six drives, the power demand should be a lot less than the Sabrent. I'd still like to disassemble the Sabrent to see what sort of PSU it's using. I'm 99.9% sure it's something custom, but you never know until you actually eyeball things. I'll report back in a few days. Wish me luck.

I think I'm gonna give up on having a pool. Maybe a computer. I was trying to clear that 18 TB Exos out using diskpart. This Exos has the label of ST1800NM. Another 20 GB Exos that I had bought a few months ago has the label ST2000NM. I was tired, bleary-eyed, more than a little frustrated with all these problems, wasn't thinking 100% straight, and selected the ST2000NM in diskpart, and cleaned it. Problem is this drive had gigabytes of data that was critical to the pool. GIGABYTES. I still can't believe I made such a simple, rookie, and yet devastating mistake. My God. I don't know if any of the file table can be salvaged, as I just did a simple "clean" and not a "clean all", but I've got a recovery request into Rossmann Repair Group to see if they can do anything with it. I know there are some tools in the wild that I could probably run myself on the drive, but I don't trust myself to do much of anything atm. I should never have thrown money at an AM5 system. I also probably should've stayed away from the Sabrent and anything like it. Instead, I should've done what any sane person would've done and assembled a proven AM4 or Intel platform in a full tower and attached the drives directly to the motherboard. Yeah, the cable management would've been a nightmare, but literally anything would be better than this. My goal of staving-off obsolescence as much as possible has instead kicked me in the teeth while I was already lying prone in a ditch. If, by some miracle, Rossmann is able to recover the data, I'm going to take a long and hard look at my PC building strategy. Hell, maybe I'll throw money at a prebuilt or one of those cute HDMI-enabled NUCs that're all the rage. I just know that I'm exhausted and am done with all of this, at least for the time being.