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The Danger of Shared Disk Complacency
By Oliver Rist | March 4, 2007, 1:33 pm
I did a review of Iomega’s 500GB StorCenter network hard disk for InfoWorld a while back. Good review for a typical 3-week review period. Nice solid case, two 500GB hard disks in RAID 0, 10/100 Ethernet and a USB out for printer sharing, an additional hard disk or some kind of other backup device. I had to give up my home server right around that time ’cause that was borrowed, too. Since I don’t use a home server for much more than data storage (no kids, so that parental control thing isn’t exactly a priority), swapping that power sucker for a shared hard disk seemed like the smart thing. Iomega agreed to let the device stay for a long-term review, and I was off and running–right to that comfortable easy chair called complacency.
See, setting up the clients to backup to the StorCenter was easy (Especially the Mac, Linux & Vista clients because they don’t even need that goofy Iomega client software. Just find the disk and connect.) But going to the trouble of getting a backup to the StorCenter was something I simply never got round to. Too much other stuff to do and those two hard disks just kept chugging away so conveniently.
Right up until Friday when the Iomega’s connection suddenly dropped in the middle of a transfer then refused reconnection. The device’s indicator lights stayed blue (Iomega’s equivalent of green), but I couldn’t reach it off the XP box. Went to the Vista Ultimate hooked to the TV and tried from there–gonzo. The MacBook saw it. Even opened a directory, then it, too, dropped the connection. Now I’m worried. I reboot the Iomega, cross my fingers and happy day, she comes back. Everyone connects. I’m happy. Restart my transfer and BAM! she dies again. Now I’m cringing inside. I repeat the process and do a smaller transfer (the original was 6GB) and everything works fine. Start a second. Cool. Start a third, and she dumps again. Crap. It’s dying.
Iomega doesn’t give you a lot in the way of diagnostic software and I don’t have a spare disk–doesn’t seem like a disk problem anyway. Seems like a network interface problem. Now it’s a salvage job. I had about 20GB of media data that I was trying to transfer off another borrowed-and-due-back machine when all this happened. Decided to drop that on a partially empty XP machine that wasn’t on the network. That’s when I discovered the totally cool Tornado box that I’ll describe in the next post. 20GB saved.
Dug through a variety of portable, external USB hard disks and discovered that I had about 80% of the work data there (whew!)–stuff like my articles, business records, etc. What I didn’t have anywhere else was 21GB of music (70% CDs so that’s recoverable with some work, but the rest is BitTorrented and losing that would have sucked) and 47GB of TV and movie recordings. That’s a lot of data for a flaky drive. Shit.
I started carefully. Opened the Iomega. Tried to reseat the drives as best I could. Let it sit for a while and cool down. Then rebooted. I worked solely of the Max since that seemed to have the best success earlier. Then just started transferring in small bites, rebooting when necessary. Took most of Saturday night, and I’m lucky I have TV access in the office or I would have chewed my elbows off. But I got my 68GB off. Damn near filled the MacBook.
Now I’m setting up a 500GB Western Digital NetCenter disk I hadn’t gotten around to using much. Only a single hard disk in there, but still better than not having a shared disk. After that, I’m hooking that Iomega REV drive to the whole thing. Has decent backup software and a 70GB capacity with compression. Two cartridges and I should be okay. Pain in my ass, but I’ll write about that later.
Meantime, the moral of this story is that shared hard disks are a great convenience but they can’t be your main backup resource and your central data dump at the same time. Primary reason is that when something goes wrong with those things there’s not a hell of a lot you can do about it. The Iomega at least gave me the option of adding a new disk, which would have been great had it actually been a disk problem. The NetCenter won’t even have that, tho. It dies and the data goes with it. And zotzing it to a USB hard disk is a one-time fix that’ll quickly become old. Better to suffer through the REV and backup software install once and stay happy via the miracle of scheduled backups.
Topics: Storage hardware |
One Response to “The Danger of Shared Disk Complacency”
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March 4th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
One might think that the RAID0 was a bad idea before even getting into the discussion of backup procedures…. but then, this is Oliver we’re talking about.