HAL was a Christmas present. He addressed my wife’s need for a storage strategy for her digital photographs, amongst other things. Within the family I was widely known as a geek. The fact that she welcomed a NAS as a gift cemented her standing in that regard.
HAL was twice upgraded such that he presently sports five 2 TB Seagate Barracuda
This past week another drive has failed. Once again, no data has been lost, but our confidence in the remain drives has been shaken. The loss of two drives in as many months suggests that the remaining drives can’t be trusted.
I used to be a fan of Seagate disks, but I’m not so sure anymore. This set are only about 2 years old. I’m a little surprised that they have started to fail so soon.
As I write this HAL is disgorging his contents to a large, new portable hard drive. Not a speed demon even when he was new, the process is taking quite a long time. It’s time to replace the old-one-eyed file store.
I gather that LaCie was purchased by Seagate. According to a thread over at Small Net Builder the LaCie brand will eventually be repositioned as computer attached storage. The NAS range will soon be Seagate branded. Tim Higgins has the new systems in hand for review.
In truth, or data storage needs have subsided with my change in career path. Where HAL was once RAID5 and nearly full, I was able to shift to RAID 10 + spare when I didn’t need to hold onto file sets from my former broadcast customers. Now we are a lot more like a typical family, retaining mostly digital photos, music and some software.
In light of this new reality, I might be inclined to rely more upon local storage in our desktop computers, perhaps in conjunction with a cloud backup solution. However, Stella has stated her preference for a dedicated network bit bucket for her photo library. So I guess that we’ll be considering a new NAS shortly.