The machine is unremarkable on purpose: a low-power board, 32GB of ECC, four 8TB drives in two mirrored pairs, and a boot SSD that is not part of the array and holds nothing I would miss.

Mirrors rather than a wider parity array, which costs half the raw capacity and buys a resilver that finishes in hours rather than days. Given the rest of this blog will mostly be about drives misbehaving, that trade has already justified itself twice.

What it does: files, photographs, backups of four laptops, and a couple of small services that would be irritating rather than catastrophic to lose.

What it deliberately does not do: anything anyone else in the house depends on in real time. No home automation, no DNS for the whole house, no media server that makes the television useless when I am halfway through an upgrade. That rule has survived contact with two years of temptation and is the single reason this remains a hobby rather than an obligation.

The log exists because the last two machines taught me the same lesson twice. You fix something at eleven at night, it works, you go to bed, and eight months later the identical fault appears and you remember nothing except a vague sense of having been here before.

So the format is deliberately boring: what changed, what broke, what fixed it, dated. Not tutorials. There are enough tutorials, most of them written by people on day one of a thing rather than month nine, which is when you find out whether the advice was any good.

Starting numbers, for something to compare against later: 14TB usable, 2.1TB in use, all four drives at zero reallocated sectors, idle draw 41 watts.