I Told You I Wasn't Feeling Well!

Went to work today on my Bike Shaped Object, it's not my Sunday bike it's an old heap that I use to commute when it's light and dry. It's not safe to bike round here in the dark of winter and I don't like arriving wet hence my preference for dry and light...

Only one moron on the road today, thinks its okay to cycle through the nettles so he can hurtle down the middle of the lane at an unsafe speed... However there was an ever so nice person a few minutes later who stayed a long way behind until there was a safe place for us to let them them to past - they even waved (in a nice way) at us.

While at work my home server sent me an email to say that the hard disk had managed to reallocate all the bad sectors to spares - which is good news. A few minutes later it sent another email to tell me that it had run out of spares and any further damaged sectors would just stay damaged - which isn't so good.

When I got home (nice bike ride) I set about swapping the drives around. I first plugged in the new external drive and ran a backup to it to make sure I had a backup of everything that matters in the event of me screwing up the drive swap. Once that was done I told the server to remove the damaged drive from the RAID1 array. I powered down the server and took out the bad disk and put in a good one. I then restarted the server and added the new one to the array. I then had dinner while it automatically rebuilt the array.

The result is that all my data is stored on two different drives again and if the older of the two starts to go bad, I have a duplicate on the younger drive. I didn't have to manually do any file copying - that all is taken care by the multi-disk admin tool. Good stuff this open-source, free and often better than the expensive alternatives, or as they say in France: Linux? Il y a moins bien, mais c'est plus cher.

Today's picture is the most interesting part of an ill Samsung 0.5 TB HD501LJ hard disk drive that I now have sitting on my desk. I don't know if I can be bothered getting the 5-stared screw driver out to dismantle it to blip it's innards.

I know it's got bad sectors because it told me so, but some less honest people would sell this on eBay. You wouldn't notice for quite a while that you were losing data unless you monitored it carefully and most people don't...