Home Network Upgrade on hold…..

Wow….when things go bad, they go really bad. Late last week you may have seen a few tweets from me about a Terastation I have that lost a drive. I have two of the 1.6 Tb models and they have both been running 24x7 for about 6-7 years now. While sitting at my desk last week and performing a backup one of the drives made a harsh noise and then the diag light pooped on the front of the Terastation. Just so happens that is the storage area I was backing up to!  Fortunately, I have both units in RAID5 mode so there was no data loss. After some troubleshooting and a call to Buffalo Technologies it was determined that the drive is indeed bad and will need to be replaced.

But it gets better…..my second Terastation that gets used far more (it holds all of my digital media) went inaccessible over the weekend. After some troubleshooting I managed to get it back online but the odd thing is there *is* data loss. One folder in particular has *ALL* of the digital pictures I have taken in the last 10+ years and it simply does not exist any more. Also, the front of the Terastation is blinking the power and diag lights constantly which indicates a RAID failure of some sort.

And if that weren’t enough…..

My primary Media Center machine has been giving me fits. It has a hardware issue of some sort as it is hard locking at random times. I have flattened it a couple of times and it exhibits the same random lock up issue.

So now I am looking at replacing my primary Media Center and roughly 4 gigs of NAS storage before I make any significant changes to my home network. My preliminary plan is to replace the Terastations with a single Windows 2008 R2 Server loaded with drives and let it become the backup storage server. In fact I may overload it with storage and let it also be a Data Protection Manager machine to cover backups of everything on the home network. As for the Media Center, this makes for a good excuse to bring the heavy hitting quad-core gaming system out of the basement and attach it to the big screen. Nothing like playing World of Warcraft on a 63” TV with all the graphics settings maxed out! It is already running Windows 7 Ultimate so it can double as the Media Center machine with ease.

Now to start pricing some hardware!

 

Cheers!