Just before Christmas, in anticipation of Time Machine, I bought a Lacie 1TB disk that was on offer from MediaMarkt. It’s a monolith-style black box, with two physical disks inside that appear as one contiguous space when mounted on the Mac. It’s fast (for a USB drive), but it’s not quiet … it has a fan that kicks in every 30 seconds or so, runs for 10 seconds, then cuts out again. Still, that’s not a big deal, as it’s mainly running overnight in the study when everyone’s asleep, and one day it will be plugged into an Airport Extreme or Mac Mini, and tucked out of the way.
Except sadly this morning, it had a woeful little red light on underneath the cool blue light. According to the manual, red means “Disk Failure/Error”. Oh joy. I think I need to not touch anything technology-related for a few weeks.
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Time to build a NAS!
I’m at the stage in my own NAS project where I need to buy the drives. I’m looking at about 2K USD for 8x1TB drives. It will be painful, but in the end, I won’t have to deal with FW/USB drives again.
I thought about some of the larger pods that offer raid5, but in the end, I’d still be dependent on cables and my g5 tower, so I figure a cute FreeBSD box will give me the stability I want and allow me to reboot my core Mac without worrying about the other computers on the network becoming unhappy.
NAS not on the cards just yet … I’m moving around too much to invest in an expensive cluster of storage in one location. S3 backups might be the next step, if I can just get a reliable network connection …