When will I learn, that Seagate drives suck! 

So the last thing I want to do this weekend is spend time swapping hard drives in my file servers and making backups of my data just in case. But, Seagate drives that I've been rocking for the last few years decided it would be a great time to start causing me headaches. I should have learned by now. 

In the server I call resource, I had not one, but two 1.5 TB drives decide to crap out on me, one was a complete failure, the other started throwing S.M.A.R.T time out errors when trying to poll the drive, so I had to do an emergency swap there. The shit bit (kind of) this is part of a RAID0 disk set, which is a backup of my server Storage, so a quick drive to Canada computers and $230 bux later, the two drives are swapped and as of this post I'm in the process of copying 5.3 TB +/- a few GB of data from Storage to Resource. About 1.3 TB has finished copying over thus far. 

It's been a couple of years since I last looked at my blog / website. I figured it's about time that I give it a revamp, and start posting content to it. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to tediously go through the process of migrating the old data (it's not much, but I'm lazy) from my old word press form to a new joomla site. I'll be making some tweaks along the way, so it's possible that things may break as I go. 

Here's what the old site used to look like, for archival reasons, I'll keep it around. You can find it at http://oldmatt.capranos.com . 

I'm looking to build a new NAS, my current server I call storage is starting to fill up again and I'm meeting hardware limitations. The current RAID controller in the chassis is a 3ware 9500S-8 port controller. It's been a rock solid card for me, but it only supports disks up to 32 bit LBA, which was great when drives were no bigger then 2 TB, however to support newer drives that are larger then 2 TB, I need a new RAID controller that has support for 48 bit LBA. Since I'm currently running 8 x 2 TB Seagate ST2000DM001 drives in this machine and I can't install any drives bigger then 2 TB while using this controller, it's time to plot a new course of action.

So I have a couple of options:
option 1 - buy a new controller and buy newer 8x 3TB (or bigger) drives and migrate all my data over.
option 2 - build a new server, use a similar 9500S-x raid controller with 16 ports instead of 8 and with the 2 TB drives, build one large file server
option 3 - do both.

I've decided to go with option 3.  And this is where the classy chassis (sounds like a porn name) comes into play.

I've been scouring Ebay for the last few months, trying to find some new managed switches for my environment at home. Currently, I'm rocking a pair of Cisco 2950 switches for my layer 2 infrastructure. I came across an Ebay ad, that appeared to be too good to be true. A guy was selling a pair of Cisco 2960s switches, with the work stack models for $250 bucks! I pounced on the ad, arranged a time to drive out to Whitby and picked them up, I brought them into work to make sure they worked and I can't believe it, no dead ports, all interfaces came up 1000 Mbps full duplex and it came with a set of the work stack modules with the cable.

They're going to be standalone switches, so no need for them to be clustered, but still it's a hell of a good deal! Time to schedule a maintenance window, where I drink beer and cut my old switches over to my new ones.

It didn't take long before my storage server (my NAS) filled up. The initial build had 8x500 GB hard drives installed, it gave me approx. 3.5 TB of usable space. When I consolidated my 2 previous file servers into this one, I had about 500 GB +/- a few GB of free space left over. I thought that amount of space would have lasted me a little while, but leave it to me and my brothers to continue downloading content. So it didn't take log to fill that up. I've decided to stick with the current hardware and go out and buy 8x1.5 TB to push for a new upgrade path. First I had to migrate all of my data to a different server, thankfully I haver another box, where I could put 4x1TB HDD's into RAID0 for a period just long enough to copy my data off, put the new 8x1.5 TB drives into my current storage NAS and then migrate the data back. With this upgrade, I'm sitting around 9.55 TB of usable space.....let's see how long that will last before I fill it up.