MikeBrum.com

I have a Windows XP host that’s been serving network storage via a RAID array serviced by a Promise FastTrak RAID card. This has been the way of things for a bunch of years now and it’s been pretty good for a while. There’s been the usual Windows issues, but it hasn’t been “bad”.

I try to be a responsible admin and installed Windows updates this morning. Unfortunately, after the requisite reboot, the host never came back up. Since it’s headless — no monitor, keyboard or mouse — I had to get all that hooked up and figure out WTF was going on. Turns out that the box was just hanging at the loading screen.

Long story short, even with various repair options nothing is going to work.

And since I’m running out of space on my array anyway, I decided that I’m just going to upgrade to a NAS. I planned on doing this anyway (and retiring this box when I did so) but I just couldn’t justify throwing it out when it was working. At least now I’ll have a dedicated NAS that is more efficient, has a smaller footprint and consumes less power than a dedicated PC that’s just serving up files.

My Amazon order was placed this morning (along with a Gig-E switch) and hopefully it won’t be too long until they’re on my doorstep.

Since my RAID array is just type 1 (a mirror), I’ll just take one drive out of the pair and put it in a USB enclosure and copy over files that way. Pretty straight forward and painless. I’ll then take the drives from the array and use them as backup disks (my Time Machine disk will get a healthy upgrade and the disk that was backing up Corinne’s laptop failed a little while ago and will get replaced).

It’s not horrible, but I would have just preferred to save the money. At least I planned on making the purchase in the first place — just not this soon.