What Do You Want?

Due to massive problems I had to replace two of the hard disks in my server in a hurry recently. As I had positive experience with Western Digital RAID Edition drives in the past I bought two RE4‑GP WD2002FYPS drives. Silke and I installed them earlier last week and our server is in a satisfactory state again.

A few afterthoughts on the whole affair:

1. It is very disappointing that one of my server grade Seagate Barracuda ES.2 hard disks died within little over two years.
2. The good news is that Seagate offer a five year warrantee on this model. I am therefore entitled to a replacement which I have requested via their website.
3. Before you return a faulty hard disk to Seagate they however ask you to run SeaTools to get an error code. The quality of this tool is really impressive. You can download a bootable ISO image with a DOS version that doesn’t seem to work. I tried it to boot on both my HP Proliant ML110 G4 and on an old Pentium 4 PC but it hung after loading the main program. As a result I had to use the Windows version. This version of SeaTools has a charming Windows for Workgroups style user interface. But to be fair it got the job done in the end and confirmed that one my Barracuda hard disks was indeed broken.
4. Seagate’s warranty serviced turned out to be very good. I shipped the broken hard disk, received the receipt acknowledgement on Tuesday and the new hard disk on Friday. The replacement hard disk is only a year old and looks brand new.
5. Considering that only one of the disks was really broken I’m still a bit puzzled why the second hard disks initially showed problems as well. In a system using SATA with its point-to-point connections you would hope that disks don’t interfere with each other. But somehow they seem to do nevertheless which is not what you would hope for.

Anyway, I’m decided to give the two Seagate hard disks a try and installed them as the second RAID 1 in my server.

My home server is using RAID 1 to keep all the files stored on it safe. The idea is that if one of the hard disks fails I can just replace it without losing any data. Well, that is the theory.

Last night both of the hard disks in the primary RAID 1 volume of my server started to report bad blocks. As a result one of the hard disks got removed from the volume. Two attempts to add it back have failed because parts of the other hard disk cannot be read as well. My attempt to create a backup of the file system containing the bad block revealed more bad blocks and locked up the remaining disk. I will have to restore the data from last Saturday’s full backup.

I just hope the partially working hard disk will keep running until the two replacements arrive.

Our Cocker Spaniel puppy Vader has grown so much since we got him almost three month ago. He is now taller than even fully grown Cocker Spaniel bitches. We also managed to house train him in record time. And mostly thanks to Silke’s continuous efforts Vader does not only come when being called but also obeys other useful commands and walks well with or without a lead.

Last Friday Chris suggested to take advantage of the brilliant weather and go on a punting trip. As this sounded like an excellent idea we decided to join in and take Vader with us, while Silke also used it as an excuse to try a new Muffin recipe.

The following day we met with Chris and Jeremy at the Mill Pond in Cambridge and hired a punt. It was a really lovely day and the city centre was densely packed. After enjoying the sunshine for about half an hour in a nearby park we could board our punt. Vader was a bit nervous at the beginning because being on a boat was a new experience for him.

But after a while he really started to enjoy the trip.

Thanks to Chris’s and Jeremy’s formidable skills in handling a punt we made it all the way to the Byron’s Pool where a weir divides the river Cam. When we got off the boat we met Islay, an eight month old Labrador puppy, and her owners. Vader had a lot of fun playing with Islay and the two dogs zipped around us like bats out of hell.

After all that excitement and exercise Vader got very tired on the way back to Cambridge. After a few minutes he was sound asleep in the punt.

Overall we all had a really great day. Vader handled his first punting trip very well and enjoyed it like the rest of us.

If you want to see more pictures of our expedition please have a look at Chris’s blog posting.