Skip to main content

Sometimes, things work as intended

A small computer success story:

I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory.

After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems.

...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that

  1. The troubled disk had finally failed.
  2. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it.
  3. When everything was finished, the system would let us know.
I ordered a replacement drive (Western Digital Red, in case you care) from Digitec, and said that I'd pick it up at their depot on the other side of town.

On Wednesday afternoon, the system sent a follow-up "everything's good now" message. By that time, I'd picked up the replacement drive. After removing the bad drive, installing the new drive and logging in, the system gave me a vague "You need to follow our advice and finish doing something" warning. I wish I'd grabbed a screenshot. It was almost hilariously vague.

Fortunately, I knew what had to be done. I told the system to configure the new drive as a hot spare for the other drives. It immediately kicked off a full check of the new drive. On Thursday, the spare was checked and ready to go.

Overall, aside from one confusing error message, everything worked well and exactly as designed. I've worked with storage in previous jobs. It's never that easy. Status checks fail. Notifications fail. Rebuilds fail. Replacement drives don't arrive in time or, when they do arrive, the new drives won't play nicely with the existing drives. Even though this was a small home problem, it just worked. It's so nice when that happens.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Maralyn GableFriday, June 9, 2017 at 1:47:00 PM GMT+2

    Sounds like it worked well, which is neat because it seems computers seldom do.
    How do you know a hard drive is ready to fail if it doesn't send you a note?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MeFriday, June 9, 2017 at 4:28:00 PM GMT+2

      Hard drives include something called SMART https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. that lets your computer ask the hard drive whether everything's okay. In theory, your computer should check your hard drive's SMART status occasionally and alert you if anything's amiss.

      The unfortunate reality is that computers do a bad job of passing along those messages (or, when they do, of making it clear that "SMART error" means "You need to buy a new hard drive right away"), so you usually know that a hard drive is bad when it starts to make terrible noises and stops worksing.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fixing Linux Audio

This is somewhat technical, and it's aimed at people who use Linux and are comfortable editing files from the command line. I was looking for a quick fix, but discovered that most of the documentation out there is wrong. So, I had to research what it all meant, figure out what the correct settings were, and write it all down. For the Impatient If you use Linux, and you're just looking for a quick way to make your sound better, add these lines to /etc/pulse/daemon.conf or $HOME/.config/pulse/daemon.conf   default-sample-format = s32ne default-sample-rate = 192000 high-priority = yes default-fragments = 8 resample-method = speex-float-10 I've tested this on Fedora and Ubuntu with no problems. Also, if you're using an external DAC (if you're not sure, then you're not using one), be sure that it has sufficient power (either plugged directly into the computer or into a powered USB hub. DO NOT plug it into an unpowered hub or dongle. A...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late ...
Post a Comment
Read more