I’m anxiously awaiting the results of my fantasy hoops playoff matchup. The week concludes today. As I write this, I’m tied 4-4, one category even, with Petway Dunks, the arch-asshole of our league. Games are still in progress…
I think I mentioned on this blog (certainly in person to some folks) about my NAS frustration. In January I bought a top-rated, well-featured (is that a real phrase?) network-attached storage device from Infrant, the ReadyNAS NV+. Key attributes include a variant of RAID technology for the file system such that so long as you have two hard drives in the NAS enclosure (room for four), the hard drives are backed up in such a fashion that a drive can fail without causing any data loss. You can also hot-swap failed drives out and add additional drives to increase the storage, and the ReadyNAS automatically updates the RAID array to replace the failed drive or increase the array size to reflect the additional hard drives.
And I’ve pulled ahead of Petway! I’ve got three active players in the 3rd quarter of their games, he has one player yet to start his game. My chances for a win are better than 50-50: Nick Collison would have to come through above his season’s averages for Petway to climb ahead of me.
Back to the ReadyNAS–the setup disconnected from my network a couple weeks back and was basically frozen. It required pulling the power cord to shut down, then refused to complete the boot process. The Infrant technology may be great, but the tech support is dog vomit. Basically, you can’t talk to a real person, you fill out a Web form to file a support claim. And then they never respond to it. OK, I got one initial response, then nothing after I responded. So I filled out another support claim and left a voicemail on the phone line. And nothing. Really frustrating, considering I had transferred a lot of my personal documents and my iTunes library to the NAS setup–hey, it’s a redundant backup, right?
Browsing the web forums on the Infrant site indicated that it was likely that one of my two hard drives had failed and the Infrant was hanging on boot because it kept trying to read the failed drive. Hard drives fail in somewhat of a reverse bell curve, moderate frequency within the first two or three months of purchase, then reliability, then high failure rates after a couple years. So the possibility of a brand new hard drive failing wasn’t unreasonable. Given that my NAS setup should withstand the loss of one hard drive with no data loss, I decided to pull a hard drive and boot again. Sure enough, problem isolated, and my NAS setup is back online. I ordered another hard drive today to get back to redundancy while I work with Seagate to have the failed drive replaced under warranty. Problem solved. And a big f you to Infrant.