> Meanwhile the only issues I had were needing to solder a resistor onto the motherboard to resolve some issue
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!
Agreed. it was a pretty freak issue, albeit one that had a well known fix. I stated it here in full disclosure and did state that this was beyond what most people would consider tolerable. And I'll admit that I came very close to throwing it in the garbage and buying a new one.
Still, other than replacing old drives, something that'd happen regardless of solution, that's the only fiddling I ever had to do.
That was almost certainly the Intel Avoton clock degradation issue. It hit Cisco and lots of other networking vendors too. I lost Supermicro and ASRock boards to the same thing. Soldering on the resistor gets the CLK circuit back into spec for a while, but I had an officially-repaired board eventually fail again in the same way after a few more years since it keeps degrading.
That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.
I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.
I swapped my dead C2750 (Supermicro A1SAi-2750F) board for my cold-spare C3558 (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F) and was right back running again. I guess if you're talking about an appliance it's a little different, but this was just my home firewall/router FreeBSD+PF+Jails machine.
And actually a good reminder for me to eBay up another cold spare, because I totally forgot to.
You and I must have a different idea of "fire and forget." I've been running my NAS on a generic Dell running stock Debian for over a decade now, and I've never had to get the soldering iron out to maintain it!