Buffolo TeraStation PRO TS-HTGL/R5

I got this for free with 4 2TB WD green. Quite a bargain, eh? Well, it has its downside. The power consumption is bad, more than 20 Watts when just idling around. The disks never spin down. Its quiet, though. The maximum transfer rate of about 20MB/s using Samba is ok for me, but NFS is painfully slow to the point of being useless.
You can get root on these things, simply by wiring up its serial port. One might then be able to solve the spin-down issue (or maybe not). There was once wiki dedicated to this and some similar devices, and it seems one can put a real Debian on it. That would probably solve the NFS issue too. But it seems to be rather painful to do and the Version of Debian is really old. I could ditch the whole thing altogether and just hook all the drives in my home server. If it had enough SATA ports. Or drive bays.
But overall, i would be fine using it as it is. I can mount it on my server and then export it in any way i like. Its behind NAT anyway and i can put it on its own VLAN, only connected to the server. So the old, unmaintained firmware pose no issue. But i need a way to comfortably switch it on or off, i cant stand the 20 Watt all the time for being used once or twice a fortnight. Of course it does not support wake-on-lan.

Remotify

As WOL is out, my second thought was switching the box to the mains via an remotely controlled relays and set it to automatically power up after power loss. Which it, again, does not support. Ah well.
Third thought: remotely simulate pressing the power button. And here the box has a nice feature (finally!): pressing the button for about two seconds while already running starts its shut-down process. So when i find a way to remotely press this button i can easily start and shut down the device.
The button pulls a line to ground when pressed. I guess i could simply wire a GPIO Pin to the control line and wiggle the PIN from floating to low. That should not even interfere with manually button wiggling. The micro controller intended for this task is connected to my home server, which should be no problem if i first ground both devices together. I guess. I opted for simply using a transistor as, well, an electronic switch. Probably should have used an opto coupler.
And as i am on it, i also wire in a relays so i can actually disconnect the device from mains.

The two Transistors are BC547, but any small signal NPN Transistor should be fine. The Diode is an 1N4007, but any reasonable normal Diode should work. The Resistor values are not critical. Keep the rough ratio and range. Vcc can be 5V or 12V, depending on your Relays.

Other

Mijzelf' repo
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://itimpi.updog.co/telnet.htm Bad link: 0

Disposition

Put into deep Storage.