Geekzone giveaway: Crucial P1 NVMe SSD (m2)

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2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2131837 22-Nov-2018 13:36

Just rationalised my storage. I had a Qnap 212 two bay NAS, 2TB; a Netgear NAS 2 bay 2TB; three external HDD's 1Tb, 1TB and 4 TB. In an effort to save power and rationalise my storage and purchased a new QNAP TS-453BE NAS. It came with 4 bays each with 4TB giving me a RAID array with a total of 10TB.

I have 4TB of Movies and 1TB of photo's and growing. I installed PLEX server directly on the NAS and use all of the multimedia apps in the Qnap. It works great. Shifting PLEX from a server PC I had to the NAS also works great. All in all I have removed 6 devices. Haven't worked out yet if I am saving any power but the whole installation is a hell of a lot cleaner.

To make me feel better I donated the NAS and external disks to Mt Albert Grammar School who were doing an upgrade at the time and wanting extra storage. I gave my extra PC to my daughter. Overall a great outcome.

KShips

153 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 15

#2131840 22-Nov-2018 13:40

We were on holiday taking lots of photos which previewed from cache on camera no problems and looked good. Wasn't until at some point went to review our photos and found no photos had saved, card had failed and wasn't writing to the card but camera could still see card so didn't produce any 'No card' etc errors :(

Lyderies

266 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 67

#2131841 22-Nov-2018 13:40

A couple of years ago where I thought I knew everything about computers I decided to play with the settings of my os drive, after about five minutes my pc would no longer recognise it, my os would no longer install on it and at that point, I gave up, grabbed my savings and built a entire new pc so I wouldn't have to deal with the old one.

From now on, If i don't know how to do something i spend a couple of weeks researching and then do it.

I'm going to noob myself past judgement

pengo

18 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 2

Trusted

#2131842 22-Nov-2018 13:42

This is an embarrassing story, but as my sense of humiliation has abated with time, I'll share it.

In the mid nineties I managed a radio station which was tentatively entering the digital era by storing commercials on a new device called a Digicart. All Digicarts had a slot for a 10MB Bernoulli disc, and the on air studio's Digicart also had a 40MB hard drive. At the end of each day the production engineer would cull expired commercials from the on air studio hard drive, then copy new commercials to that drive from a Bernoulli disc. Once a Bernoulli disc became full, it could be reformatted, which was quicker than manually deleting each commercial.

After we took delivery of our Digicarts, I noticed that the Reformat menu on the on air unit - the only unit with a hard drive - didn't make it obvious whether the Bernoulli disc or the hard drive was the target of the command. I forget the exact wording, but I recognised the potential for disaster - the possibility of erasing all the commercials on the hard drive - and issued an edict that no-one was to reformat a Bernoulli disc in the on air unit. This wasn't a hardship, as the production and news studios both had Digicarts.

One particularly busy afternoon I needed to reformat a Bernoulli disc myself. Yes, I can tell you already see where this is going. The production studio was busy. The news booth was busy. So I thought "what harm could it do?" and "who would know?" and slipped into the on air studio as a long record began to play and, Bernoulli disc in hand, asked to use the Digicart for a moment.

We were to play a lot of long records that afternoon. I slotted in the Bernoulli disc, selected "Reformat" from the menu, dithered for a moment over the two confusing targets listed underneath that menu item but, confident I knew what I was doing, selected "Disc", pressed the Enter button, selected "No" when the abort dialog appeared ... and waited for the twenty seconds or so it took to reformat a Bernoulli disc. The twenty seconds became forty, became sixty, and with a sinking feeling I recognised what folly I had wrought. All content was deleted from the on air studio's Digicart.

Perhaps the most painful part of this episode was having to immediately admit what I'd done. The team was wonderful; we commandeered the news studio, copied the advertising schedule and began the slow and sorry process of restoring the contents of the hard drive from reel-to-reel master tapes. It was a surprisingly quick process; we had everything up to date within two hours.

While it was a reassuring disaster recovery exercise, this was an episode I never completely lived down, but a lesson well learnt. If you make a rule, you have to abide by it too.

coolfu

10 posts

Wannabe Geek
+1 received by user: 1

#2131845 22-Nov-2018 13:46

One day I was swapping some hard disks in my PC case. But I was bold enough (or careless?) to do this while the PC was still powered on and running.

Next minute, the exposed plug of a SATA cable I was moving around (which was connected to a disk on the other end) came into contact with a fan header on the motherboard. There was a really loud bang, a bit of smoke, and some burning electrical smells. I ended up short-circuiting and frying the motherboard!

networkn

Networkn
32866 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 15456

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Lifetime subscriber

#2131846 22-Nov-2018 13:46

I am pretty fortunate really. I've never had a personal drive, or the drive of a loved one suck it without a backup, and actually across nearly 30 Years of owning computers from my first 386sx20 to now I've never had a drive fail substantively.

This is made somewhat more impressive by the fact that since the days of the first 36GB 10K Raptor Sata drives (Followed by 72GB and 140GB ones as the years went on, I've always run 3 or more drives, spinning or SSD in RAID 0. I was one of the first to adopt SSD's at a massive cost. It was in my opinion the biggest computer upgrade I'd ever seen in my career as a single component upgrade.

Having said that, I do have GOOD backups, that are regularly checked.

If I win this, I'll be looking for a way to put it in my PS4 Pro or Xbox One X.

Lego

Shop now for Lego sets and other gifts (affiliate link).

kotuku4

485 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 137

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Lifetime subscriber

#2131847 22-Nov-2018 13:47

Sorry sir, yeah but the dog ate my homework.

(ps we don't have a dog).

Yeah I had a main home pc drive fail and lost heaps of personal stuff and family photos. I got lazy and didn't connect a back up drive and save data.

Starlith

210 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 82

Trusted

#2131849 22-Nov-2018 13:49

When I was a 7yo I formatted the family computer with a very simple dos command (Damn you 7yo idiot). Unfortunately the Packard Bell PC didn't come with the OS Install boot disc (Damn you Noel Leeming).

The end result meant from then on I spent alot of time playing outside until my parents found out what I had done. And I was Guilty..

browned

636 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 36

#2131852 22-Nov-2018 13:53

Around 1995 my first computer was purchased for my IT study, a DX4-100. It came with some dreadful amount of storage space and a CD ROM drive. First thing I managed to do was fill the HDD with data. So a second HDD 3 times the size was purchased.

Installing that OEM drive took around 6 hours, at least 3 hours on the phone with the shop I purchased the computer from. Who would have thought adding a second IDE hard drive would require a degree in ribbon cable management and also in IDE Pin 39 signals, called DASP (Drive Active/Slave Present). But the drive installed, nothing broke, and I could carry on with my assignments after a 6 hour delay. No internet help available back then, I didn't have a modem for the first year so no BBS either.

The days and nights I remember installing, reinstall, formatting, defragging, scandisking, Autoexec editing, IRQ changing, IPX/SPXing with friends on repeat. What a way to learn Windows and OS2 Warp.

33coupe

1024 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 75

ID Verified

#2131853 22-Nov-2018 13:53

I've had several blue screens of death which has always scared the life out of me and all my photos etc.
I ended up buying recovery software (and large hard drives to recover them to).
Have also helped out others so money well spent.

But installing an SSD was life changing for me. Load up in under 10 secs. Ex gf approval for using it as htpc.

Thanks for entry

CraigHumphrey

61 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 22

#2131854 22-Nov-2018 13:54

I've had many an HD fail over the years, only one SSD so far...

Worst was the system drive in my Windows HomeServer - fortunatly the way Windows HomeServer did multi-drive HD storage meant that I was able to build a new server and just re-attach the old disks... Whew. Only about 4TB total back then. Now I have about 16TB hanging off it...

He's a pile of fail:

Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

Omen

35 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 3

#2131874 22-Nov-2018 13:57

When I first started building my own PC back in 2002, I was scrounging components / $ to try make the budget work. I managed to get a nice enough Duron build up and running, but between a second hand case and a bunch of OEM components I ended up with only had 2 screws to mount my 80GB hard drive. In all my wisdom I decided it would be best to mount secure the hard drive on one side only, then forgot all about it till my disc failed. After claiming a new disc via warranty I did the same thing again...

Lucky for me, m.2 drives only require one screw :D

Edit. Don't get me started on my first foray into ZFS either, I bought 6x Segate ST3000DM001's, lost 3 in short succession, replaced them with more M001's, long story short. I ended up losing all my data in a rebuild, learnt the hard way that raid is not a backup & swore to never buy seagate again.

BuffyNZ

241 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 27

#2131876 22-Nov-2018 13:58

Many many years ago, before git and github were things, I was dual booting between Windows and Linux.

I booted into Windows and it told me 'Windows has repaired an with the partition table'..

It hand't. :(

On that day I learnt the importance of backups.

I lost all the source code for my personal projects.

Recursion: See recursion.
--
“It is important not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, even when you can agree on what perfect is. Doubly so when you can't. As unpleasant as it is to be trapped by past mistakes, you can't make any progress by being afraid of your own shadow during design.”

--Greg Hudson, Subversion developer

whittaker007

8 posts

Wannabe Geek

#2131877 22-Nov-2018 13:59

Since moving to a laptop as my primary computer for the last decade and coming from an old-skool computer owner's paradigm of hoarding all my music, video and photos on local devices I needed a storage system to keep all that media off my laptop SSD which is too small to contain it all. So I bought a 4-drive Netgear ReadyNAS a few years ago with X-RAID for data redundancy. Over time a couple of drives failed and were replaced without serious issue and expanded it to around 3TB of redundant storage.

A few months ago however I had a drive failure, and the replacement disk I bought didn't seem to work when replaced. So I bought a second replacement drive with the plan to return the first replacement drive assuming that I just got a dud. The second replacement drive also failed to rebuild. So I borrowed an old NAS off a friend to back up my NAS contents before another drive failed and I lost the lot. Bandwidth for the second NAS was limited to 10/100 ethernet speeds, and had a tendency to get stuck part way through a transfer and become unresponsive until my NAS was hard rebooted by yanking out the power cable with spinning non-redundant disks in it!

Eventually I managed to back up all the data using terminal commands so I could monitor the process and restart when it failed. This process took a couple of months. I then had to wipe the drives from the NAS and build a completely new RAID array, inserting one disk at a time. The third drive bay slot would not accept any drive, pointing to a hardware failure on the NAS itself as the issue. Unfortunately it is no longer under warranty. The original drive that was in that slot seemed to be OK, so now my NAS is down to a 3-bay RAID array, and I have 2 brand new replacement 3TB drives that can't be used or returned. And it's taken another couple of months to transfer all that data back.

seeby

13 posts

Geek
+1 received by user: 45

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Voyager Internet

#2131880 22-Nov-2018 14:04

When I first started Orcon in 1996, I had no option to have RAID or anything. The authentication server, the web server and the email server all ran on a pentium 100 machine with a 300mb HDD which was a pretty state of the art setup at the time. If the HDD had died in that first year, before I got separate machines and started doing backups, then Orcon probably would have gone bankrupt and never been “a thing”. Thanks to that Seagate 300mb HDD for not giving up on me

www.voyager.co.nz

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