23 April 2026

OK it's my own fault for not being careful about checking what I was buying, but I needed another 8Tb disk as the off-air TV recordings was filling up the existing disk. At under £80 delivered it was good buy, and arrived the next day. The magic I had missed was 'SAS' rather than 'SATA' and although the drive plugged into the hot swap disk cage and powered up, it was not visible. You need a different controller which will handle SAS and as it happens drop back to SATA as well. The ones suggested were only available from China and on a long delivery, but eBay had a reconditioned ASR-5405Z at £14 although it needed a separate cable which the Chinese offerings included. The cable was only £7.46 so the package was not bad, and the controller arrived Monday with the Cable following on Tuesday. There were signs that Linux had found the new card straight away, but actually talking to it proved a problem. The arcconf software is not available on openSUSE and initial scouting around with help from Llama4 failed to find a source I could use. When the cable was plugged in, I could even see the new drive, just not do anything with it! I had a hospital appointment Wednesday, so it was not until yesterday evening I could get stuck into what was going on, and Llama4 it turns out has no idea on these sorts of problems. So having potentially risked the two SATA drives by hooking them up to the new controller, I switched to Sonnet4.6 which and the results were chalk and cheese. Having corrected Llama4 several times and reminded it of previous answers it seemed to just ignore, Sonnet4.6 got to the base of things in the first answer, although even it missed that the card needed to be left until it had actually scanned the disk before you can do anything. The tools were actually telling me that however not recognisably. Sonnet4.6 spotted this straight away but failed to recognise that we needed to wait. It did however identify an alternate source of the arcconf program, and I actually had things working before going to bed, but not made progress on mounting the new drive. A new day and a clean start, and currently srv9 is copying a large folder from media2 to the new media3 ... which it looks like it's just finished.

arcconf is available from Microchip although the links provided by both Sonnet4.6 and duckduckgo search no longer exist. I eventually found it's now location, or rather locations as the more recent V4 version seemed not to work, while the V3 version gave a help menu however said there were no controllers. I did a cold reboot, and magically arcconf V3 reported a controller and showed the attached disk. Fairly quickly this morning we worked through the steps and got the drive attached finally using jbod mode to create /dev/sde. A little hold-up as I was waiting on yast/partitioner formatting the disk, only to realise that it was waiting for another 'next' before it ACTUALLY started the format. Next step is to tidy up and see if arcconf V4 will actually work now that the controller is actually 'ready'. ASR-5405Z Configuration Notes will document all the relevant bits from the process if only to remind me when I get around to a fourth disk in the machine, which I've just realised I can now use the last slot in the 4 slot cage as previously I only had 3 spare SATA cables. Something good comes out of the mess.

Another area that has been fun recentrly is the problems playing videos that have been recorded over 20+ years and now don't play properly ... avidemux Updates and Notes contains the short version, but I need to pull some of the test stuff into that crib sheet.