Daily WTF: AOOSTAR WTR Pro Power Edition

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want this to be an optimistic happy post, I really do. However it just doesn’t work that way isn’t it?

Given that everything is going to shit quickly, including the hardware prices, I thought I’ll stock up on hard drives and populate my storage unit with newer disks. Namely, factory recertified HAMR Seagate drives, of which I’ve got 2x24T and 2x28T. During the course of this forklift I finally managed to put together a working ATA LPM configuration which does not wreck ata port 3 on Aoostar WTR Pro (I mentioned it in one of the previous posts).

However.

What happens instead is, when I insert all 4 disks, the machine doesn’t start properly. It starts spinning up, but power cuts off. If you allow it to suffer, it’ll restart and spin again about 10 times, eventually for drives to gain enough momentum and spin without power fizzling out. And at this point the machine actually proceeds to boot up and everything is grand. But! If for some reason you spin down all the drives, and then try to spin them up, you lose power and have yourself an outage.

I can’t imagine nobody tried to put 4 HAMR drives into this thing. Anyway, there are 2 options - either it’s the PSU and using 200w one will help, or it’s a 12v rail limit and then I need to throw this thing out and put together a new nas - and now it’s the worst time to do that.

Daily WTF: USB-C PD Edition

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago I’ve upgraded my home server setup to AOOSTAR WTR PRO. It had its share of problems at the start, which sadly included sata instability on port 3. I had an email conversation with aoostar support, and they even sent me a replacement backplane which did not fix the problem. Eventually they’ve sent a new firmware, which kind of helped to the extent. For lack of the better hypothesis I’m now of the opinion that ATA LPM is to blame.

One thing I haven’t tried then is to run this thing from an USB-C power supply. The documentation claims it’s possible, I briefly tried plugging it into Apple’s USB-C brick (heavy version), but the server would not start properly - it looks like it’s running out of power mid-startup, on repeat. I stopped experimenting and forgot about it.

Now I’ve decided to upgrade my UPS setup, and for that I went with BLUETTI Elite 30 V2 Portable Power Station. It was on sale (still is), there’s some content on the internet on how to integrate it with the rest of the stuff, so I thought why not. And it has the USB-C PD output ports.

You can guess where it’s going.

These USB ports don’t do shit with the server. It loses power 3 seconds into boot and starts again. I tried plugging it through power-z but I don’t see anything wrong, it negotiates for 20V and tries dutifully to pull less than 100W, which is the same it does over AC. But still it doesn’t work.

I’m pretty sure a more lengthy debug session is in order. Maybe it’s because the port is wonky? Or maybe it’ll start working if I eject all the hard drives? Or there’s something wrong with Bluetti’s implementation, although my phones work fine with it.

Bottom line is, I just want things to work properly, I don’t want every fucking interaction to require a debugging session.

Aoostar on Think before you push the button

Daily WTF: AOOSTAR WTR Pro Power Edition

Daily WTF: USB-C PD Edition