Early last month, my 20-month old UNVR stopped working. I pulled the drives, tried the Reset button, and thanked the Deities that I live in an area where a UNVR is something that I can buy. In a store. On a Sunday.

At the time I’d seen hints that wearing out the internal storage was not uncommon. What I hadn’t learned, yet, was that the internal storage is a USB stick. My discovery of this was accidental — I was mucking around on my new UNVR and decided to run lsbusb -tv and there it was.

With a quick search of the Googles I found fresh knowledge that it is, in fact, a generic USB stick, and that replacing it is as simple as putting in a blank drive and holding the Reset button on boot. I guess they learned some lessons from the EdgeRouter Lite USB failure debacle. Just. Not the lesson that they should never put a USB stick in a device!

I’m tempted to hack this “extra” UNVR into a NAS, though I have concerns about what could go wrong if the USB fails again. I’ve had great luck with Samsung Fit drives but maybe an M.2 SATA SSD in a USB adapter would be a better option.