Repeating Old Mistakes

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!

Old and Busted. Blast it with a heat gun or your girlfriend’s blow dryer for a moment to release the glue.
New Hotness, Samsung Fit 32GB.

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.

4 thoughts on “Repeating Old Mistakes

  1. I just received a new unit in September after a prior unit experienced a NIC failure, I opened up the new unit and discovered the USB is no more. It has been replaced with a Toshiba THG8M flash chip

  2. FYI, newer models do not have the flash drives. I’m assuming it’s eMMC memory like the UNVR-Pros. I voided my warranty today and took it apart. I’m on board revision 38.

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