Hi, I thought I would post this, it might save others some grief. Last year (XMAS 2005) I built a new PC platform which became the new household server (Slimserver as well). Santa Clause brought me a thermaltake Tower case and I purchased 3200+ AMD chip, new motherboard etc. I was seriously considering purchasing a RAID 5 Controller to connect the 4x300G SATA drives I picked up during the boxing day sales, however the Hardware controllers were quite expensive, so I decided to implement it the "cheap way" and purchased a ASUS motherboard with a built in Silicon Image controller with RAID capabilities. Installation went fine, Gigabit LAN between the server and the HTPC (EAC ripping platform) Fast Ethernet and wifi everywhere else throughout the house connecting the families pc's, laptops printers and 4 squeezebox's. 900 Gig RAID5 file volume for WAV files, FLAC files and important family pictures, documents etc. I encourged the family to store important doc's on the RAID5 volume. Everything was fine until early Nov 2006, when a power cable (splitter) which had a faulty ground pin similtanously powered down 2 of the 4 hardrives within the RAID volume. The drives were instantly "orphaned" and the RAID volume was no more. This effectively deleted 5-6 years of family vacation pictures, and 450 Gig of ripped CD's (WAV format). I shuddered at the thought of the time involved to re-rip the 600 CD's. Also the "minister of domestic affairs" stated that I shall recover the familly pic's regardless of the cost. I checked data recovery services, but all started at several thousand dollars, I called ASUS, they were no help, I called Silicon Image, their technical support basically told me to "piss up a rope" (thanks guys, I will remember that when making future purchases). I was reasonably sure the data was still on the disks, but how to access it? Neither ASUS or SI bundled any RAID recovery utilities with the motherboard software. I eventually came across a company called Runtime Software http://www.runtime.org/ who sell utilities to recover files off corrupted drives etc. They also had a utility for retrieving files off of damaged RAID5 volumes. In order to use the software they need to create a duplicate image of the RAID vol. that they would work from. Therefore I needed approx. 850G of disk space. So I purchased a Buffalo Terrabit station (NAS). The SI controller built into the motherboard would not represent the 4 SATA drives independantly, therefore i had to purchase a Promise 4 port SATA controller. Once the duplicate image is created from the original damaged RAID vol., Runtime need enough disk space to copy the recovered data to from the copied Image, therefore I required another 500G drive. Eventually I recovered all my data. I now have the original 4x300g SATA drives configured as JBOD on the promise controller. The JBOD is backed up to the NAS nightly using a filesync application. I have run 300' of direct burial CAT5 cable to my nieghbours house, I will be placing the NAS at his place, and in turn he can connect his squeezebox to my Slimserver over the network. I am also considering a power conditioner for the server. So that is my little story on how a 30 cent power lead cost me $1300 and a month with no Slimserver!
Lessons learned, don't go cheap with RAID5, especially if you are putting all your eggs in that one basket. Thumbs up to Runtime software, and there support. Thumbs down to SI and ther elack of support. P.S. for the Network Engineers out there, my neighbour and I are thinking of also connecting our WIFI routers together and Running OSPF ECMP over the wifi and physical ethernet. Nothing like some more diversity, in most cases you are worried about the "random back hoe" taking down your primary link....in our case it's the "random garden hoe" :) Cheers, Scott -- sfraser ------------------------------------------------------------------------ sfraser's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2026 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31963 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
