Monthly Archive for October, 2007

For those “in the know” I had two hard drives fail in the Windows Home Server system about two weeks ago.  Windows Home Server can handle one drive failure, but when two go at once there’s going to be some level of data loss.

Let me explain.  When setting up storage shares on the server, one can direct Windows Home Server to perform folder replication, which I did for all my shares.  When this is enabled for a particular share, the server keeps two copies of the files in that share, one copy on two separate hard drives.  If one hard drive fails, the server takes the other copy and copies that onto one of the other working drives.  Of course, one needs at least two hard drives for this to work, and I have six (eventually seven, bringing storage capacity to around 2.6 terabytes).

When the two hard drives failed, I lost a handful of files, and luckily they were easily recreated.  This was my fault.  The drives were known to have a high probability of failure (they failed before), and yet I put them in thinking, “Both fail at once?  I doubt that will happen.”  It happened.  One of the drives doesn’t spin up anymore, acting as though it’s shorted inside when power is supplied to it – can’t get much more busted than that.

So, I ordered two new drives and put them in last week.  These drives are in external drive enclosures as A) I don’t want to overburden the cooling abilities of the case, and B) there aren’t enough SATA ports on the motherboard anyway.

Today one of those two drives failed, and I’ll be replacing it under an RMA exchange.  This time, given only one drive failed, Windows Home Server automatically adjusted storage to compensate, making duplicates of files needing new second copies, and the defective drive was removed from service via the Windows Home Server Console.  I lost no data, everything is a-ok, and that, in one word, is awesome.

Given I’m walking virtually all the time now, it’s no surprise that as I swapped my summer clothes with the winter ones, I found my jeans and etc. to be too big now.  Time for new clothes.  Yesterday two friends and I made the trek to the Seattle Outlets in Tulalip, which is about, oh, 40 miles (64 km) north of me.  As usual I-5 was goofy, except this time there was a reason for the slow traffic: a traffic collision.  Once we arrived at the outlets we swung into the food area for lunch.  Then, we started our loop.

I wound up with three pairs of shoes, three pairs of pants, one polo shirt, and one hoodie.  No, I don’t want to look at the receipts.    I’d like to get some cargo pants and a few more shirts, but at the moment I’m sitting well with what I bought.  Perhaps this coming weekend I’ll head to Bellevue Square and look around there.  We’ll see.

After the outlets, we drove back to Seattle where one friend met with some others for dinner, and the other friend and I went to HaNa for some sushi.  As always, it was really good.

Last night I sprayed water repellent on the shoes and today I’ll wash the clothes I bought.  I’ll also replace the car’s battery (finally) and do an oil change, for those wanting to know what else I’m up to today.