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May. 1st, 2009 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogOne of these followed me home from work earlier this week.
It's a an external SCSI drive tower. It has eight bays and takes IDE hard drives. It has an onboard hardware RAID controller that supports 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, 30, 50, and stand-alone modes. Pretty slick.
It also came with 8 200GB drives slotted into the little individually locking drive sleds. Which I had no key for. As it turned out, all I had to do was call up the manufacturer, Promise, and ask them to send me the key. Yay!
A few problems getting it up and running lead me to, at Posi's suggestion, start individually checking each disk with SpinRite by putting them into a desktop machine I have sitting around. I figured that would take ten hours per disk or so. Well, I'm done with four already; they choked within the first hundred megabytes. Not surprising; SMART reporting says that they have 37,000 plus hours of run time. That's over four solid years.
I'm finding the good ones and keeping them, and I'm going to replace the bad ones with little drives I can dig out of my basement. I'm hoping I'll have at least three good 200s. If I do, they're going to become a RAID 5 partition, and I'm going to back up my network attached storage to the tower. Redundant backup makes geeks happy.
I also snagged an Ultrium tape drive that I think uses 200/400GB cartridges. I was thinking about backing up to tape, but I'm not sure that it's really worth the bother. I think I'm just going to Ebay it.
And now back to your regularly scheduled cleaning. Hopefully the cloud of dust that I blew into the air when I cleaned out the inside of the vacuum cleaner (The bag had fallen off of the little nozzle and all the dust had just coated the inside of the cavity. I used compressed air to get it all out.) has settled and I can work without sneezing myself unconscious.
It's a an external SCSI drive tower. It has eight bays and takes IDE hard drives. It has an onboard hardware RAID controller that supports 0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, 30, 50, and stand-alone modes. Pretty slick.
It also came with 8 200GB drives slotted into the little individually locking drive sleds. Which I had no key for. As it turned out, all I had to do was call up the manufacturer, Promise, and ask them to send me the key. Yay!
A few problems getting it up and running lead me to, at Posi's suggestion, start individually checking each disk with SpinRite by putting them into a desktop machine I have sitting around. I figured that would take ten hours per disk or so. Well, I'm done with four already; they choked within the first hundred megabytes. Not surprising; SMART reporting says that they have 37,000 plus hours of run time. That's over four solid years.
I'm finding the good ones and keeping them, and I'm going to replace the bad ones with little drives I can dig out of my basement. I'm hoping I'll have at least three good 200s. If I do, they're going to become a RAID 5 partition, and I'm going to back up my network attached storage to the tower. Redundant backup makes geeks happy.
I also snagged an Ultrium tape drive that I think uses 200/400GB cartridges. I was thinking about backing up to tape, but I'm not sure that it's really worth the bother. I think I'm just going to Ebay it.
And now back to your regularly scheduled cleaning. Hopefully the cloud of dust that I blew into the air when I cleaned out the inside of the vacuum cleaner (The bag had fallen off of the little nozzle and all the dust had just coated the inside of the cavity. I used compressed air to get it all out.) has settled and I can work without sneezing myself unconscious.
