Replacement RAM arrived, tested and seems to work OK. It passed a 10 hour test when run within specifications, which is good enough for me since I am not overclocking. The new system is a definite improvement in terms of performance. It's cool and quiet. The noisiest component is the 135mm fan in the Antec power supply, followed by the internal WD Green and Blue HDDs. I contemplated replacing the PSU fan with something quiet, like Enermax or Noctua, but it's an odd size and I don't really want to put any dodgy hacks into a mains power supply. The whole computer is nowhere near as noisy as the air conditioning - in fact it's much quieter than most laptops.
In the meantime I had two more HDDs fail in the last few weeks. I lost about 5.5TB of data that I would have preferred to retain. It's not a complete data loss disaster of important irreplaceable stuff. Just irreplaceable stuff that would have been good to still have - like build trees, SDKs, firmware images and package feeds for all previous firmware releases and a fairly comprehensive library of media test files. The source code was backed up, but since the builds are not reproducible, I can't actually recreate a previous firmware build version. So, whatever is out there is out there and that's that.
The HDD failures over the last few years consist of 5 x Seagate and 3 x WD drives. All these drive failures were after their warranty has expired, ranging between approximately 95,000 and 25,000 power on hours.
But that's not all! It really has been a shitty few weeks. A dead V2, noisy fan on a T4 (in addition to a dead tuner), broken garage roll-a-door (can't get the car out), blown hot water system (without hot water for 3 days), burst water mains in front of the house (a brown 2m tall
"water feature", but it only lasted about 30 minutes), and the list goes on.
2020 (or more specifically any time since December 2019) really is just one bad thing after another. And it's not just me - things seem to be
suboptimal for almost everyone in the world.
I've had a go at making some progress on the next Beyonwiz firmware branch and I am very unimpressed at the mess that upstream is making. The features that are being added (or more specifically the way they are being added) seems to create more mess than it's worth. It may be fine if you are a developer that wants to live on the bleeding edge. It seems that these guys are not interested in a consumer grade PVR that one can use on a daily basis. Tough luck to those of us who want a robust and secure system that can be relied on for every day use. It seems that now is a bad time to try to fork a stable branch because everyone is spending more time at home, making loads of breaking changes, not testing properly and not documenting any of the changes adequately. Backyard operators!
I'll try to come up with a usable firmware branch, but it may take a (long) while...
On the positive side, I put some time aside for brewing beer and the last two kegs turned out really well. A 4.2% Best Bitter and a 7.5% British IPA. I'm trying to decide whether I should design a new ~10% Black IIPA recipe or tweak my existing 6.5% Red Rye Ale for the next batch.