OMG shoot me.....

[JKnightandKARR]

First off anyone needing/wanting new drives......  RUN AWAY FROM WESTERN DIGITAL!!!!!!!!.......  I got a Dell Inspiron 17 5765 gaming laptop, Win 10.  Well after sometime, the original HDD started to die.  System running, but SLOW and Task Manager HDD status ALWAYS 100%, so replaced with a SSD, got Win 10 in, n few other things, drivers ect, and set aside, well misplaced the power cord, so sat till I found it...  Upon powering up, now stuck at Dell logo, find out drives bad.... literally NO USE....  New drive later, back up, trying to install Win10, DONE, and Ubuntu on other partition I made....  that's becoming a PAIN.... rant off...

[Chris Savage]

First off anyone needing/wanting new drives......  RUN AWAY FROM WESTERN DIGITAL!!!!!!!!

So, I used to be a Seagate fan circa 1994. Over the years the warranty policy changed and I moved to Western Digital. But then the average HD capacity was 80MB. I stuck with WD until they reduced their warranty and Seagate increased theirs. I think that was circa 2001. At some point I went back to WD, however, since then I have had failures and issues with support.

I also had issues with relation to their NAS drives, of which I have two! I got better support from the community on the forums than from the company itself. It turns out they kept changing the firmware on the NAS drives and the newer firmware seemed to indicate that a drive was failing at the end of it's warranty period, even if if was fine. This really irritated me and wasted time with me sending in drives for warranty coverage, getting remanufactured replacements, only to have those be flagged as bad as well.

In the end, the solution was to roll back the firmware and not allow the NAS to update itself. It's sad that this happened, and from the messages I got on the forums from other members, it has happened to MANY others! To add insult to injury, recently WD notified me that legacy HD and SSD would be two different branches of WD. Support is split as well. I'm going back to Seagate eventually. In the mean time I switched my SSDs to Samsung.

[JKnightandKARR]

I've had similar issues with my Netjoke router... they wouldn't honor the 1yr free replacement... which still had a short time, kept trying to tell me that its not the router, but bad cable or something.... ODD.....since I got Linksys router, I've had ZERO issues with the 2G and/or 5G bands dropping connection.... hmm.... sounds like router to me.... 

what is NAS btw??

[Chris Savage]

what is NAS btw??

NAS = Network Attached Storage

Ever since I moved to CA I've always had at least one NAS drive on my network configured for RAID 1 (mirroring). It allows me to access all my data from any computer on the network, as well as control what type of access of computer has to that data.

I started off with Buffalo LinkStation 220 2TB, then added a second one, but now I have two WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra 4TB each. I also created a Raspberry Pi 5 NAS Drive 2TB, however I haven't finished configuring the software on it yet.

RAID 1 (mirroring) writes all data to multiple hard drives at the same time, providing redundancy. If a disk should fail, you simply replace it and the NAS will restore the data back to the replacement disk. You can still continue to access the good copy while the bad disk is being replaced. This is how I have prevented losing any data for nearly 20 years now.

Before having a NAS drive, I used to use a File Server, but NAS drives simplify things and you can access the internal settings and configure them from a web browser on the network. For example, if your NAS drive has an IP address of 10.10.10.2, you simply type that into your web browser and you can sign in and access the settings pages.

One thing to note is that most NAS drives list the total capacity, because you can use different RAID modes (not just 1). So if you buy a system that has two 4 TB drives and you use RAID 1, you still only have 4 TB of space, because the drives are mirror images of each other.

[JKnightandKARR]

Probly good idea for me to try n set up. When you get the Pi ver done, will i be able to use it with info on that link?

[Chris Savage]

Probly good idea for me to try n set up. When you get the Pi ver done, will i be able to use it with info on that link?

Yes, if you have the same hardware, but there's more than one way to do the same thing. I chose the SSD Pi Hat (currently on sale) and two 1TB SSD, but you could just use external SATA drives with a USB interface to create the same. Performance would be less, but for a home network for a non power user, that shouldn't affect you. In fact, when I first got the R-Pi 3, that's exactly what I was going to do with one of them (the other was used for RetroPie).

In fact, they don't even have to be external. There are enclosures designed to hold 3-1/2" SATA hard drives and a Raspberry Pi and you can connect via USB. The R-Pi NAS drive I built will be used for my engineering data, which is currently on the same drive as everything else. This isn't a problem, but I did want to isolate the engineering data.

[JKnightandKARR]

Cool was hoping so. Outta check into one to back stuff up

[Chris Savage]

Cool was hoping so. Outta check into one to back stuff up

Ironically, each NAS drive has an external USB drive that I use to back them up in case of a fire. The backups are obviously stored in a fire safe.

My main NAS drive has the following mapping:

M: drive is mapped to my Music collection on the NAS. As a former DJ, I have well over 20,000 artists in more than 60GB of MP3s on there.

P: drive is mapped to my Photos collection. Spanning from 1990 through 2025, each folder is a year, then sub-folders for the months, then within those they are date organized complete with tags, etc.

R: drive is mapped to what I call the "Repository", which is where I store certain backups, such a Thumb Drive backups.

S: drive is mapped to my Savage///Circuits folder, which is the engineering data we were talking about. That drive is split into Source Code, Projects, Z80, etc. Eventually this drive will be mapped to the R-Pi NAS, instead of the main NAS.

T: is mapped to a dedicated NAS drive for streaming media, which my TV is connected to. I can watch movies or shows that I have converted to MKV format.

V: drive is mapped to my Video backups, which is captures and projects for videos I work on. Wish I still had the project files for my original SCTV videos, but alas, those are long gone.

W: drive is mapped to my Website backups. There are sub-folders for each website and then within those are the various backups and data elements for the various websites.

Z: is mapped to a folder called, "Zion", which is a vault of application installers for all my software applications, such as video editing software, music software, etc. There are also backups from my late wife's PC and my "FONTS" folder, which is a huge collection of fonts.

As I said, all of this information is available to authorized devices connected to my internal network. PCs, tablet, phone, etc.

[JKnightandKARR]

Cool

[JKnightandKARR]

https://geekworm.com/products/x1011
Just noticed they have a 4 m.2 hat. That'd be handy for a NAS correct?

[Chris Savage]

Just noticed they have a 4 m.2 hat. That'd be handy for a NAS correct?

The description says, "(Not Support RAID)". Not sure why though. It simply allows (up to) four independent drives. It may be that some software like OpenMediaVault can handle RAID independent of the hardware, but I haven't gotten that far with it myself. I want to go through each R-Pi from the oldest to the newest before I finish software on the last two (R-Pi 5s).

[JKnightandKARR]

Ok, better to ask then not know. Thanks

[granz]

Well, looking back to Joe's original posting, specifically his title - if one of us were to actually show up at his house, and comply with his request to shoot him, he would probably get mad at us. Come on Joe, don't tease us, either ask us to shoot you, and don't get mad, or don't ask us to shoot you. 

[Chris Savage]

Come on Joe, don't tease us, either ask us to shoot you, and don't get mad, or don't ask us to shoot you. 

Sage wisdom.

[JKnightandKARR]

Well, looking back to Joe's original posting, specifically his title - if one of us were to actually show up at his house, and comply with his request to shoot him, he would probably get mad at us. Come on Joe, don't tease us, either ask us to shoot you, and don't get mad, or don't ask us to shoot you. 

Dude,
.... Gotta be litteral don't ya?  Do NOT make me to learn how to resurrect the dead!.... I will get John Wayne, and if that don't work I gotta small dog that has breath that will derail a freight train! ROTFLMAO