…but not completely uneventful. My back has been killing me, not allowing me to do a whole lot for the past couple of weeks. I did manage to add another drive to my unRAID array though.
For the longest time, I’ve been using a Linksys NSLU2 NAS device to act as my networks file server. For what it’s worth, it’s been a great little NAS-head. I’ve had a 250GB USB external drive attached to it and it has just worked. However, it’s pretty slow and it gets used quite a bit…despite the fact that it’s not protected storage. So, I decided to move some hardware around and made some pretty good changes over the weekend.
My VPNSVR was upgraded and moved away from the old 933MHz Gateway I was using. I replaced it with an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe, P-M 2GHz Dothan CPU and 2GB PC-3200. I put a 36GB Raptor in it for the OS and the 250GB drive from my NSLU2 for the data drive (WSUS and FAX directories). The 320GB in the old VPNSVR went to my unRAID set so that I can have a dedicated file storage drive for all of my applications, drivers, pictures and repository for my wife’s stuff. So now, all of it is protected and on GbE (the NSLU2 is 100Mb).
The problem I encountered in putting that 320GB drive in my unRAID server was with the IDE controller on the DG965 motherboard…it doesn’t seem to work in unRAID. Either that, or there’s something in the BIOS that I missed - which is unlikely since the BIOS sees the drive just fine. I had to put a Promise ATA PCI card in it for the unRAID OS to see the drive. Not a big deal as I’ll eventually be taking that drive out once I add more SATA storage. Adding a PCI device didn’t seem to impact it as much as I had thought since clearing, formatting and copying the files took less time than I had expected. We’ll see what happens when I generate a new parity this week.
The last thing I did this weekend was to clear my old RAID3 set on MEDIASVR2. A drive had temporarily failed for some reason last week and I had to re-add the drive and restore it. Once it was finished, I went ahead and moved what I wanted to unRAID and just cleared/reconstructed the array so that it is now 100% free. I’m considering taking those drives completely offline and save them for the port multiplier PCIE card and 5-bay external enclosure I’ll be getting soon. Since there’s no way I can afford 5 new TB drives, I might as well get some usage out of the 5×500GB drives I do have. That’s a lot of storage to do nothing with. The drives aren’t even a year old either, so they’re not much of a risk. I should be ready to do that by July.
