Are you the kind of ‘early adopter’ that loves to have non-consumer grade kit in your house?
Do you have PC based devices in your house to perform chores that embedded devices usually do?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the questions above then you understand the pain that is in my household currently.

In a revious post I postulated the woes of losing a raid 5 array and the heartache that goes along with the sick to the stomach feeling that you have lost years worth of accumaleted entertainment data.

It has been two weeks now, and I am pretty much no closer to having my 4 hoe systems back together again.

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It is an old addage, but it is too too true.

Nothing earth shattering has happened, so breath a sigh of releif there, but I lost the home server on the weekend. Well it was a pretty devastating even to the kids.

The OS disk of my centos 5 based server went tits up for some reason known only to itself, and refused to reboot.

So that took the details of the software raid array with it, and now I am 1TB of data lighter.

That isnt quite true. There is still a chance, albeit a small one, that I can get the data back, I just havent been brave enough to try and rebuild it yet.

Basically that is 800gb of TV and movies that has been lost to the ether. (all recorded off TV of course. OF COURSE)

I guess a backup would have been a wise thing to do, but when you splash out for 4 x 320gb discs to build a 1TB array, backing it up is actually a bit daunting.

Should I have built 2 arrays?

That wouldnt have helped because it was the controller (software) that failed so I would have had 2 dead arrays.

I knew the risks and I took a calculated risk considerring that it *was* a raid 5 array.

Lose a disk and pop in a new one for self healing….. right?

<sigh>

1TB external USB 2 single disks are now <$200 AUD so I guess that having one of them as a backup would be wise idea, but that is where you start to think crazy thoughts.

Hang on, I can get 1TB disks now for the same as what I paid for the 320gb’s. For $400 I could replace the aging 320gb drives with 1TB drives and get a 3TB array. How cool would that be?

And roll on the backup issues once again.