Bog Roll ::

One of the disks in my home server has started to moan. It's a 4 year old Toshiba 6 TB drive. I installed it back in 2016 by upgrading a computer I'd originally bought in 2008.

The original computer had a pair of 0.5 TB drives in a mirrored pair, and by 2015 I was running out of space. The PSU had already died and the case fan had developed a squeak, so both had been replaced already. One of the disks started to fail, so in 2016 I bought a new motherboard with more & faster RAM and a faster & cooler CPU. I swapped the two 0.5 TB Samsung disks with a pair of 6 TB Hitachi disks. Annoyingly one of the Hitachi disks died with a week and I had to swap it.

At the moment the computer is my home server, holding all my music in FLAC format, tv and film downloaded (not ripped DVDs) and backups of the other computers. The disks work as a mirrored pair, so even if it does die I have a copy of the data on the other disk.

I've several options:

• Wait and see if it gets any worse, the Samsung took several weeks to fail previously and never got to the point of the RAID system complaining.
• Swap the failing drive with a similar new drive.
• Replace the pair with two new drives - the size could be different, the current array is 6 TB, but only 2.2 TB is actually used, so a 4 TB pair would suffice and accommodate several years more growth without a problem and be cheaper than 2 new 6 TB drivers.

Annoyingly since I bought the original 6 TB drives, the price has actually gone up, they are now €175 each on Amazon, and I paid slightly less than that in 2016, which is the first time I've ever encountered inflation on computer components - for most of my life things had undergone deflation...!

posted 11:18 :: /kit :: permalink :: ^

Brexit is the gift that keep giving. The UK is now heading for a no-deal BREXIT after Johnson's so called oven-ready deal has turned out to be a lukewarm turd. Not content with signing a treaty with the EU that he then decided to ignore before the ink is even dry, he's now turning large areas of the Garden of England into a lorry car park, breaking the Union up, throwing the economy under a bus and failing to deal with a second and predicted wave of COVID.

It's hard to know if the Brexit zealots are:

• Incredibly stupid - and believe their lunatic rhetoric
• Know what they are doing because they will personally benefit from the collapse of the UK

I'm not sure which is worst, being criminally stupid or being a criminal. Either way most of the current Tory party aren't fit to be in government...

posted 12:51 :: /stuff/politics :: permalink :: ^