so part of the reason why i lost a huge number of files (in the end, let’s just say i lost everything) 2 weeks ago is because two of the 1.5tb drives i ordered were actually defective.  this will happen from time to time and i was pretty unlucky to get two bad drives but i can’t put much fault on newegg or seagate.  you have to assume the drives are bad, is what i’m saying.

anyway, yesterday i got two replacement drives in the mail.  i’ll mail back the bad drives tomorrow, because just now my second drive finished resyncing and i have 4 beautiful solid green lights on my NAS and 0 drive alerts and 3.9 terrabytes to get busy filling.

i think i’d fill these drives a whole lot faster if i had a just-announced nikon d300s.  but that might have to wait.

yesterday was a big day for me.  two packages in the mail, both of the utmost importance.  the smaller of the two packages was my release day copy of ncaa football 2010 for the xbox 360.  there is a good chance i’ll actually be able to get an online dynasty going with some people this year, and if this happens you’ll be hearing plenty more about this game.  but for now, let’s focus on the bigger package – four 1.5tb hard drives.

between the music obsession and the photography hobby, i have pretty ridiculous storage requirements.  and of course, there is the natural paranoia that any good nerd should have about hard drive failure (note: if you are not paranoid about hard drive failure, you should be).  so a while back, i bought a netgear readynas (previously branded as infrant).  it holds 4 drives, it does dead-simple raid and file sharing, so it basically fits the need of anyone who just wants more storage that is redundant (that is to say, hard drive failure isn’t a catastrophe).

did i mention its tiny form factor?  it has a nice, tiny form factor.  you can stick the thing anywhere with a power cord and a network cord and just forget about it.

my original configuration was goofy.  i had 3 drives in there of varying sizes (1x500gb and 2x750gb) – this limited the size of my raid considerably and wasted space on the larger drives, but whatever, i had no interest in buying a new drive or 2 for a moderate increase in size.  then, of course, the big drives came down in price and the equation changed a little.

i got the 4 drives for $120 each from newegg.  not a bad deal at all.  so i started the upgrade process last night.  this is what i’m talking about when i say dead-simple: pull out tray, unscrew existing drive, screw in new drive, push in tray, wait 5-7 hours (by, i don’t know, playing ncaa football 2010, sleeping, going to work, doing your normal thing because the NAS STAYS ONLINE), and then repeat for the next 3 drives.  then the one bit of downtime comes when you reboot (sleep during this step) and voila, you just turned your 921gb array into a 4.5tb array without losing any data.  and this is in a CONSUMER GRADE device.

i knew all this stuff going in, this is why i picked the readynas and paid the slight premium for it – but man, when it actually comes together in practice, i just fall in love all over again.

my laptop is in the shop (see point 2 of previous post) and as a result, i’ve spent some quality time with my old desktop in the last two days.  i built this thing after graduating college, so now it’s 5 years old but still gets the job done.  i have windows xp on a hard drive in there somewhere, but i’ve been primarily using ubuntu 8.04.  until two days ago, when i tried upgrading to 9.04

the upgrade from hardy (8.04) to jaunty (9.04) sucks.  this suck revolves entirely around the nvidia driver support, and the awkward dance i attempted to get it to work at 3am on friday morning was reminiscent of far too many days in high school, tooling around with this weird linux thing.  xwindows didn’t detect the driver, then it detected it but wouldn’t activate it, then it couldn’t activate it because it mismatched versions with the module in the kernel, and about there i stopped.  i do not build kernels anymore.

i realized when i woke up the next day that i had no reason to keep the data on this machine around, and a clean reinstall to 9.04 would be fine.  and since that realization, things have gone swimmingly.  the install off the jaunty iso was perfect, nvidia drivers were picked up and loaded properly, and i even got in some good customization so that things look pretty sharp to me now.  i find myself impressed yet again with ubuntu.

of course, as soon as the apple store calls and tells me my laptop is ready to be picked up, this machine will go into deep slumber, but it was a good experience, and it reminded me that ubuntu doesn’t suck and that desktops don’t die after 1.5 years of ownership if you build ‘em right.

and for the record: new wave theme (built-in), nuoveXT2 icons, and Sdream by *NestR as my wallpaper.