Sick Computer

[Mags]

I'm sure you guys are on the right track, but one thing I would try really quick (especially seen this in Dell's for some reason) is to unplug ALL usb devices. Either bad ports, or conflicting drivers, etc can really drive a system nuts. Have almost similar symptoms when i have my printer/blackberry/ipad/ups all plugged in at the same time.

[Mr. Analog]

Oh yeah! The DNS-323 forgot all about that, I almost bought one of those last year

My only gripe with it is that it only supported 2 drives, very affordable NAS though ($150 last I checked).

There are tons of solutions in this arena though, I just picked the one that was the least hassle for me out of the box.

[Thorin]

I'm sure you guys are on the right track, but one thing I would try really quick (especially seen this in Dell's for some reason) is to unplug ALL usb devices. Either bad ports, or conflicting drivers, etc can really drive a system nuts. Have almost similar symptoms when i have my printer/blackberry/ipad/ups all plugged in at the same time.

Surely you don't mean all USB devices, as then I'd have no keyboard or mouse connected...  I put this drive in the non-problematic Dell, with only the keyboard and mouse connected, and experienced the exact same problem.  I'm guessing right now it's bad sectors messing up the file table, but we'll see.  Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I bought an external drive enclosure and am seeing the exact same problem when it's connected and turned on - any operation on the computer to do with file access causes the whole computer to slow to a crawl and never finishes.

Now I'm going to follow directions found on cgsecurity.org/wiki to try and copy as much as possible from the damaged drive to the identical-and-empty drive.  Hopefully most of it'll be recoverable.  That's all I care about this week.  Next week, I'll start thinking about how to set up a proper backup technique, which'll probably include buying yet another terabyte drive.

As for getting a NAS, honestly I'm just as happy using one of my desktops for storage and pointing the other one to it.  I mean, even if you hook up a NAS with two drives (drive 1 mirrored to drive 2) and put all of your documents on it, you still need to back them up somewhere, right?  So why not just have two drives in your machine, and back up the important documents from drive 1 to drive 2?

If anything, I might buy two drives, install them both in the main desktop, mirror them, then use the new external enclosure to put the old, unused 1TB drive in and write backups to it.  Then if one drive fails I can keep that computer running completely on the other drive, with no loss of OS or system setup or preferences.  Of course, then I have to start thinking about what files are important or not.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to monitor mirrored drives inside a desktop?  Are there programs for this?

[Mr. Analog]

Well, usually you don't buy a NAS just for "dumb" storage you buy it for the management software and convenience that comes with it.

Media streaming / FTP / fault tolerance / failure notification / etc is all bundled together on most NAS devices, all you have to do is plug in the drives and set up the software and you can walk away. The other main reason a NAS beats a in-box RAID array is that if that host system goes down you can still get your files from another system.

I gave up fussing with onboard RAID controllers in my experiences the rate of failure on the motherboard has usually been higher than the drives so... if you have a RAID array and the mobo dies you lose everything anyway.

[Lazybones]

Benefits of a dedicated NAS vs PC:
- Maintenance is simple, everything tends to come in a nice firmware update not piles of patches
- Small
- Quiet compared to a PC
- Uses less power

As for monitoring local drives on a windows system, you might want to look into generic WMI monitoring software... I believe the drive health values are exposed in WMI but I have never tried to monitor it directly on a stand alone system, normally I would do it via an external monitoring package.

If you want a decent cheap nas http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=50186&vpn=LS-WX2.0TL/R1&manufacture=Buffalo I have a single bay 2TB but this one is a 2bay. Only downside about these cheaper ones is the throughput.

[Melbosa]

Besides the benefits everyone has listed, there is also a performance hit to a mirrored set on your desktop. So if you do a lot of IO based stuff, a lot of people opt for the NAS over local when considering this hit.

Your situation is different than most home users.  Most only have 1 desktop and a NAS is their only source of secondary storage.  And there is nothing to say you can't use your NAS as a central storage device and a backup device.  Sure it increases the risk having them at the same location, but its better than not having a Backup or Redundancy.  Most of my home client's have a NAS.  And those that have more than one desktop like the idea of the NAS as a central storage unit, as they don't leave their computers on all the time.  The NAS, as has been pointed out, usually is quieter, smaller, and uses less power.

My setup is a little different at home.  I run a central computer for all my data storage, in a RAID 5, and I use the NAS for the backup sets.  Because I have this server to do all my streaming, downloading, hosting and other needs, I bought the cheap NAS to just hold all my important backups.  Now this doesn't help with a local fire or disaster (flood, collapse of roof, etc), so you still need an off-site backup for your most important data.  I use my new web-hosting's FTP service for this, as they offer a secure file folder location, encrypted and policy locked.

But what ever solution you decide in the end, some type of backup is better than no backup.  Same goes with redundancy/fault tolerance.

[Mr. Analog]

RE: Offsite backup - Storage in the cloud is getting a lot easier (and cheaper) you can get clients that basically scan folders when you want and make automatic revision updates as you modify things.

One of my co-workers uses http://www.backblaze.com/

[Thorin]

RE: Offsite backup - Storage in the cloud is getting a lot easier (and cheaper) you can get clients that basically scan folders when you want and make automatic revision updates as you modify things.

One of my co-workers uses http://www.backblaze.com/

BackBlaze looks neat.  It's an offsite mirroring service, though, not necessarily an offsite backup service.  I got that by reading the "Archiving Files" section on this page: http://www.backblaze.com/remote-backup-everything.html

The Backblaze service is designed to protect the files you care about. Thus, we will keep a remote backup of any file that exists on your computer. Just in case, Backblaze will even keep multiple versions of that file for up to 30 days. However, Backblaze is not designed as an additional storage system when you run out of space. So, please don?t try to upload your external hard drive to us and delete your data off your drive?or we will delete those files from our servers as well.

Mel, I kinda ended up with a central computer for everything even though I had two desktops.  So I'm set up similar to you, and am thinking of the external drive or NAS as a good location for backup sets.

[Lazybones]

FYI I would start using a cloud service like drop box for things like photos etc... FYI one of the neat things about the dropbox client is that it will do local lan sync as well to ensure local client machines are up to date and the cloud, but by syncing any local changes on the lan..

I have posted a referral link for dropbox before. You get a OK amount of storage free and can double the free storage by referrals, after that if you are considering it for significant backup the feeds really arn't bad considering they have a web interface and a client for almost every platform

[Tom]

I should think about using my drop box account to supplement my current double redundant backup scheme.

So far I use a custom script over rsnapshot to mirror all the important files off my computers (and VMs), which makes incremental snapshots every day, then a second wrapper over rsnapshot runs every week that rotates the daily snapshots, and rsyncs the latest daily snapshot to a geographically separated machine.

Here at home, it stores the snapshots on a raid1 volume, and on my dedicated server its stored just on a single drive (can't afford raid there, they charge an arm and a leg for it), and the two machines rsync their backups to each other weekly.

Thats for the important stuff, that I absolutely don't ever want to loose.

For my media files (music, video), I have a large raid5 array (6x1TB=4.6TiB) which is occasionally rsynced over to my desktop which has 2x2TB (4.6TiB) setup as a linear appended volume. Why do I bother you ask? I do something insanely stupid to my server or raid array more often than I'd like to admit to... this way if I do, I still have most/all of it. And I've gotten very sick of having to hunt down a lot of it every couple/few years.

If I added drop box to the equation, It''d probably just be used to make a copy of the "really important" files. And then only possibly a small-ish subset, as my current backup size comes to about 3.7G total.

[Thorin]

Finally got around to downloading and burning Knoppix LiveCD, running it (Linux is now running from my DVD burner!), downloading ddrescue 1.8, and running it.

ddrescue was running much slower than I expected (30GB copied in 10 hours?  970GB to go?!).  I stopped it, moved drives around to a different computer so wifey can still use her favourite desktop, and have now started it over.

At the moment ddrescue is averaging 5MB/sec, which equals 300MB/min, which equals 18,000MB/hr (18GB/hr).  Which means 1,000,000MB (1,000GB or 1TB) is going to take 1,000,000 / 18,000 = 55.55 hours.  OVER TWO FRICKIN' DAYS.

I think I just found the downside to large drive sizes.

[Tom]

Finally got around to downloading and burning Knoppix LiveCD, running it (Linux is now running from my DVD burner!), downloading ddrescue 1.8, and running it.

ddrescue was running much slower than I expected (30GB copied in 10 hours?  970GB to go?!).  I stopped it, moved drives around to a different computer so wifey can still use her favourite desktop, and have now started it over.

At the moment ddrescue is averaging 5MB/sec, which equals 300MB/min, which equals 18,000MB/hr (18GB/hr).  Which means 1,000,000MB (1,000GB or 1TB) is going to take 1,000,000 / 18,000 = 55.55 hours.  OVER TWO FRICKIN' DAYS.

I think I just found the downside to large drive sizes.

It really shouldn't be going that slow unless its hitting /a lot/ of errors, or the drive is just slow.

[Thorin]

I've only encountered one error so far.  I'm sure the drive is bad but ddrescue has managed to read most of it so far.  I'm down to 1.3MB/sec average now, though.  That would make it six days <sigh>  I read somewhere that ddrescue runs around 70MB/sec on a healthy drive...

[Tom]

I've only encountered one error so far.  I'm sure the drive is bad but ddrescue has managed to read most of it so far.  I'm down to 1.3MB/sec average now, though.  That would make it six days <sigh>  I read somewhere that ddrescue runs around 70MB/sec on a healthy drive...

It depends on the drive, but on average through a non "WD Green" type drive, you should get upwards of 90-110MB/s for anything decently recent. Sounds like a bad controller (the board on the drive) or cable.

[Lazybones]

Running recovery on damaged drives is always VERY SLOW... Most recoveries I have done in the past took overnight.