Wednesday, September 03, 2003

Today at work we verified that an older NAS unit (Network Attached Storage) was well and truly dead. A Quantum SnapServer 2100, with four 30gb IDE drives, booted after being powered off for a week or so, churned the drives for a few minutes, then powered off and would not power back on - nothing helped!

So today I removed the 4 drives and put them into an old server chassis we had - a Precision 610 from Dell - and installed Red Hat 8 on it. Now the existing 9gb scsi drive is the root drive and had RH8 on it, and the four 30gb IDE drives are RAID0 concatenated together into a single 120gb drive. We figure that with non-dynamic data and weekly backups we should be fine. I might not even have to back it up that often. Once a month could work if the data is changed that rarely!

Of course, the alternative approach was to buy a single 250gb IDE drive and plunk it into the unit, giving us twice the storage for about $200, but we had no money and no time, so this approach was the solution, short-term anyway.