This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3527 for Tuesday the 8th of February 2022, today's show is entitled,
My GDK experiment, Part 3, it is hosted by Claudia Omerander, and is about 14 minutes long, and Carissa Clean flat.
The summary is the long day of talks about how he upgraded the SSD on this ACBC 900 and 1 net book.
Hello Haka Public Radio, this is Claudia Maranda, wishing you a happy new year on this first recording of mine for 2022,
and my third in this series, My GDK experiment, where I talk about how I did stuff to my ASUS EPC 900 book.
If you want to catch Part 1, that would be Episode 3383, and Part 2 is Episode 3418.
Now, there are a bunch of links that go with this episode, but I've gone ahead and just linked to my blog post about this, which has all the necessary links there,
so that way I don't fill up the show notes too much, everything's just one location.
So, just check out the blog post for more details on everything.
So, this one I'm going to talk about how I upgraded the SSD on the 901.
Now, this particular net book has the 4GB plus 16GB configuration, where the primary SSD is 4GB and the secondary is the more accessible 16GB,
which is under the net book itself, and if you just remove the cover there, you should be able to get to it easily.
So, I've been running OpenBSD current on this, and at the time, I decided to update to a newer snapshot of OpenBSD current.
So, I went through the process, restarted, and after it had completed the upgrade, and restarted again,
I noticed that the system was complaining that the root partition was full,
which I thought was rather odd, do not too odd, because I did kind of, I was kind of close to the edge there,
so I had to remove some software, but this was just ridiculous, because I hadn't installed anything else.
So, after it had finished restarting, I decided to do a DF-H on the root partition,
which is where I had the root partition was on the 4GB SSD, and my home was on the 16GB.
I noticed that it complained that I was completely out of space, but in such a way that I was actually,
I was actually missing space from the SSD.
It actually was saying that it was saying that I only had 3.6GB of space,
and that I was over capacity at 103%.
So, the only way that this could be possible is that the SSD was starting to fail.
So, it was either replaced, put everything on the 16GB and just completely ignore the 4GB partition,
but then I'd have even less space than I had before.
So, this is when I set to myself, I'm going to have to see what upgrade options there are for this network,
because 16GB is just not going to be enough.
So, I started going on the net, I looked at Amazon, show other places, eBay, to see if I could find something that was compatible with this,
and the only ones that I saw were at about 64GB at most, and they were way too expensive.
So, I was like, now there's got to be something else out there, and so I started searching again for SSDs
that would be compatible with the EPC-901, and I did come across a bunch of them,
which at first was great, but then when I started looking at them, they said that it was compatible with the 901,
a few other networks, but that was a little suspicious.
It just seems, you know, when something seems too good to be true, usually as well, that was the case here.
So, I decided to go ahead and do some research, and doing that, I actually came across some very useful information
in the blog post that I'll be putting in the show notes, I linked to another blog, where this person was trying to do the exact same thing,
and he went ahead and he ordered an M-SATA Drive, an M-SATA SSD for his network.
And it seemed to fit just fine, everything he wanted to have was able to install it.
However, in the comment section, he does know that the network did not detect it, and would not boot from it.
Fortunately, another person replied to his comment stating that the M-SATA SSDs that you see online, they may be advertised to work,
but they won't work. The thing is that the connector on the EPC-901 is a mini-PC-I-E connector slot, and it has to take a mini-PC-I-E drive.
The connectors, if you look at them on an M-SATA SSD and a mini-PC-I-E1, they look the same.
They have the same number of pins and everything, but the problems that they're wired differently.
So that's what about one person who replied to the author had stated.
So he recommend getting a mini-PC-I-E to M-SATA adapter.
One other thing that I came to realize is that it's not a SATA interface at all.
It's actually a parallel ATA interface. It's some weird custom thing that ASUS did with these networks.
So I said, okay, thankfully, I didn't purchase anything.
Now that I have this information, I can go ahead and do some searching.
So I went ahead and I looked at Amazon with a few other places, and I finally went with a
3x5 centimeter and SATA adapter to 3x7 centimeter mini-PC-I-E SATA SSD for ASUS.
It is the adapter for an M-SATA card.
I'm SATA SSD.
It cost me about $7 US, and then I purchased an M-SATA.
It's advertised as an M-SATA mini-PC-I-E120 gigabyte 128 gigabyte SSD.
You gotta be careful with some of these vendors.
I went ahead and I bought this, had good reviews, cost me $25 US.
So in total, I spent a little over 30 bucks.
So not too bad, not too bad.
It's a grade from the 16 gigabyte secondary to 120 gigabytes on this network.
So I ordered this, and when I arrived, I went ahead, and I cracked open my SSD.
My EPC network, and I went ahead and installed the SATA drive on the adapter,
and the adapter onto the mini-PC-I slot on the E.
Close everything up, cross my fingers, and turn it on.
Loading behold, the A-C-Z-P-C detected the drive with the adapter.
The only thing, the only weird thing was that because that accessible slot under the network
is the secondary, it's going to be detected as the secondary.
So what happens is when you turn it on, it complains that there's no primary,
because what I noticed is that with this adapter,
it actually disables the primary, the primary drive.
So you have to hit F1 in order to boot from the secondary.
I searched online to see if there was some sort of bios update or something that would bypass that, but there is done.
So it's just a matter of hitting F1 when the network posts.
But aside from that, it actually boots from it.
I was able to install a snapshot of OpenBSD on it,
and yeah, I backed up all my files before doing anything before replacing everything.
And then once the system was installed, I just created,
I believe I created just one large partition on the SSD.
I don't remember if I split it regardless.
I had the entire operating system plus my home directory on that new SSD.
I was trying to see if there was a way to maybe trick it,
but yeah, I just have to deal with the F1.
Anyway, so I did that, and I didn't notice quite a speed boost.
I mean, for what it is, I noticed quite a speed boost compared to the original SSD.
That's because the original SSD's right speed is very, very slow compared to this one.
This is a cheap Chinese branded SSD,
but was more than sufficient for what I was going to do with this.
And so far, it's been working fine.
I did decide to open up the network to find out
if maybe I could go ahead and install the SSD onto the primary slot to avoid the F1.
But I did come to realize something.
The internal SSD that they would just say is internal for the primary.
I assumed was soldered.
Apparently it's not.
It is on a slot.
So you can remove it, but the problem is that it is a half-hight SSD.
So the one that I purchased would not fit.
The only thing I'd probably have to do,
and I did search on Amazon and eBay for this, is get an extender cable
and try and fish that all the way to the other side.
But at this point, it's not something that I may invest money on
to get done.
For now, hitting F1 at post is fine.
It's something I've been just doing every time at this point.
But otherwise, it's been working great with this adapter,
and the speed has improved quite a bit on this.
So the point where I can actually run Chromium on this network
while SSH to wherever in a terminal.
And I have two tabs in Chromium, and it's pretty usable.
It's more usable than it was previously.
But it's pretty quickly for what it is.
And I have to say I'm very happy with it.
Other than that, I mean, that was the significant upgrade
that I did to my little network, and it's just
chugging along still so far.
So yeah, if you have an ASUS EPC sitting around,
and yeah, you think it's maybe a little too slow.
See if you can update the drive on it.
I know there are other models of networks that use the standard
hard drives.
So those should be easy to upgrade, so it's just a matter of getting a
ASUS E or something, and it makes a world a difference.
So yeah, that's pretty much it for this episode.
Not much to detail other than that.
I hope you enjoyed it.
I hope I didn't ramble too much.
I know I have a tendency to do that, and now we say that in every episode.
But yeah, I hope you enjoyed it.
If you'd like to get in contact with me, if you're on the Fediverse,
I am now on the bst.network instance.
That is my main account there.
So look for Claudio M at bst.network.
My account, my old account.
Claudio M at mastodon.stf.org is still there.
But that's just an alternate account now.
So if you want to reach me on the Fediverse, that's the place to be.
As far as email, the email I was giving out previously apparently is going away.
Thank you Google for doing a way with the free Google workspace.
So the Claudio at linuxbasement.com is going away at some point.
So if you want to reach me, you can reach me there.
You can also find me on IRC on our cast planet on the libera.chat network.
And yeah, be sure to comment in the comment section of this episode.
Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful year. Have a wonderful day, and I'll talk to you soon.
Take care.
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