GAI.NET: Delays
The last few weeks have not been kind to me. I have had a 200GB HD failure (part of a 1TB raid5). The reason that this failure is significant is that I had another identical drive failure on another of my 1TB raid5 about three months ago. Since I used my last free drive to swap in on that raid and hadn't replaced my spare 200GB drive to cover another failure, I found myself vulnerable on the second raid. Who would have thought that two different Western Digital drives would go bad within a three-month period? Gee, I would. I've had nothing but bad luck with their stuff and hesitated when I bought this round of storage 18 months ago. While I didn't lose any data or any other collateral, I lost time in restoring hot backups. Since the second raid is vulnerable and I refuse to get anymore WD equipment, it can slow-rot. So I purchased a LaCie 500GB external drive a few weeks ago for temporary storage of the VPCs on the vulnerable raid. I'll either have to cut down on storage, or purchase more. I'll decide shortly, but I'll likely not make more purchases after this because the old budget is getting strained.
Now, I have to say, that I'm Mr. Cautious about my data. I know what I can throw away, I know what I can regenerate, and I know what is critical and needs hot backup on the network. I earned my Boy Scout Merit Badge in Systems Administration (not really, but I'm courteous and kind to my data, so that should count).
So I make copies of my VPCs to the LaCie 500GB drive (this is connected by firewire-800). I leave this drive for about a week while I use the live VPCs (with no significant changes). After sitting one week, the LaCie is powered up and voila, it is unavailable, making a clicking sound and generally making me feel that God hates me and my data (or my data and I as the case may be). Failed drive, lost data, etc. etc.
Now it is off to the computer store to get an even exchange. Now, I'm really mad at this point because this drive is 23 days old from the date of purchase and CompUSA only has even exchanges through the first 21 days. I can't find the original box (somewhere in bedroom #3) and I'm worried that these guys are going to stiff me and leave me to do an even exchange with LaCie by mail. GREAT. I get to the store, wait in line behind a few customers and finally get to tell my story. The guy looks at my receipt, realizes that my drive is out of the 21 day period (and I don't have a box), calls the store manager while he fiddles with the cables. Without a discussion or any argument, he says, "Let me make sure we have one in stock. We have to keep the box of course, but we'll do the exchange." WAY TO GO COMPUSA. Unlike Josh's recent experience with Tiger, I got great service.
The story is not done just yet. I get the new LaCie drive to the house, connect it to the computer (again on firewire-800) and proceed to do a full format (as instructed in the manual). No problem. Roughly three hours later, the format gets to 99% and then outright fails. Ye-haaaaaaaaaa. No problem, I'll just do a quick format. Now I get that silly failure message again, only this time immediately, showing a message something like "Unable to format the drive". My trust in hard drive manufacturers is slowly deteriorating. HEY HARD DRIVE PEOPLE: WORK ON QUALITY INSTEAD OF SIZE. I'LL STILL BUY YOUR DRIVES. I PROMISE. My 12TB of live storage and 8TB of hot backup are testament to that. Get it right you morons. OK, I feel better yelling a little here.
So now I think to myself, hmmmmmmmmm, maybe it's the interface and not the drive. I connect the drive via USB 2.0 and try the format. OK then, we have liftoff. The format completes and Windows is happy with the drive.
I then decide to trust the drive, because I can't have four drive failures in a matter of three months now, can I? I decide to fill this drive up with duplicate copies to test this thing. So far, so good, but I'll let you know in the next few weeks if LaCie gets placed on my bad list. I'm tossing 3TB of data (that I haven't had time to analyze, but that I can regenerate) so that I have extra backups of everything on the LaCie and additionally have hot backups for the failed 1TB raid5. All of the drives in that raid5 get to play the role of spare drive on the aforementioned initially failed 1TB raid5. Again, all of these drives are WESTERN DIGITAL. I'm also running hot backups to another raid so that in case I'm surprised by another WD failure (no I won't be surprised), I'll have plenty of other faulty WD drives for that raid. In the meantime, I've got a full size axe, even though I'm not an outdoors kind of guy, that will be useful in preparing the failed WD drives for the junkyard. We wouldn't want to see those drives make it to the dump in one piece now, would we? There's valuable data on those there drives and there is nothing better than a simple workout chopping wood platters. I can justify my recent health club membership, but there is nothing better than a good old workout in the backyard to take out those frustrations and whatnot.
Now, we're not done with useless time-sucking activities. The Armed Geometer was outstanding with advice recently on Linux and Unix installations. Since I have a background in Unix in the way old days, I needed to find out what would be useful without wasting a lot of time trying 10+ different versions of Linux. HEY OPEN SOURCE GUYS - BASH AWAY AT MICROSOFT, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY, I KNOW WHAT I HAVE. Thanks again Andy for the advice here, because in the long run, you've saved me at least as much time as I wasted on my hard-drive goofiness. Solaris 10 installed on a VPC. I'll be repurposing at least one dual Xeon server for Solaris as well. To those of you that know me as a .NET guy, no, I'm not moving to the dark side, but rather taking a healthy step here on some serious Number Theory problems on my agenda. Since many of the good class libraries are available on Unix, I don't want to waste any time porting the software to .NET. Besides, I'm a strong advocate of F# which I'll address in my next post.
Time-waster item three here is finally a problem on my primary workstation for DirectX development. I've been having problems getting the August, 2005 DirectX SDK on this machine. I have .NET 2.0, VS2005 Beta2 and am waiting to resolve the DirectX issues here, as I'd like to get WPF/WCF on this workstation. Again, I have another workstation for redundancy here (with a high performance 3D video card as well), but that machine is not .NET 2.0 as of yet and isn't scheduled to move up to that release. I still need some stability. More time wasted on something that should just work. I'm not pointing a finger on this one as I just need to understand why the DirectX SDK is not succeeding in it's installation. I have to invest my time to get a better understanding of what is going on in this scenario.
So, I'm describing all of this here, because this has had an impact on a number of projects in my personal life. My JJBR work has suffered. My IronWake work has suffered. GAI.NET has suffered as well. I'm nearly code complete on GAI.NET, but I cannot commit to making that a priority, as I have to make certain that the things that "earn" are the things that receive my attention first and foremost.
I apologize to those of you that have emailed me asking of GAI.NET's status. I'll keep you posted.
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Please contact me here if you'd like to yell about hard drives, give me further advice on Unix or discuss GAI.NET.