Shuttle Raider

Even though I own a Mac laptop, my desktop at home remains a PC. My last PC's (I had 4) were full tower monstrosity's with 10,000 RPM disks. It sounds like an airplane starting up in our small apartment and then cooled down to a wind tunnel noise later. As if that wasn't enough one of them had an almost above human range squeal on occasion, just enough to give headaches. Finally, in a burst of non-laziness I spec'ed out a new box and ended up with an SFF (small form factor) very quiet PC and gave or threw away the others.

This has been mostly a pleasant experience. I'm past my Linux days at home back into the comfortable embrace of Microsoft even with it's rampant warts of spyware and viruses. I reserve my most dubious web-surfing to my as of yet malware proof OSX Mac and it serves me quite well. I also find it useful to keep my knowledge of bulletproofing Windows up to date for my work PC and to communicate with other normal computer users. You would be surprised at how quickly you can fall out of the loop when you use exclusively Linux.

Anyway, the honeymoon period of my Shuttle machine was over when the RAID failed some time ago. Then it failed again, and again and again. For quite a few months I gave up and have been working from one drive, but now with renewed intensity I've spent most of yesterday and up to right now rebuilding the RAID array yet again. What a collosal headache! I'm using the RAID to effectively have two exactly mirrored drives. If one fails then I don't lose the information as an exact copy is on the other. Great. Since I have gigs and gigs worth of photos and movies that I would be devastated to lose, I thought this would be the best seamless solution. I was wrong. Now I sweat bullets every time the RAID array "degrades" and I have to rebuild it.

It doesn't help that the documentation, while not wrong, is woefully incomplete and for a different machine. It has never been corrected. Nor does it help that the latest drivers are unstable so you should not use them. I found that out the hard way. Also, the default cables should be replaced as they are poor quality. And not last, but I'm sick of typing, the BIOS calls every drive connection something different on seperate screens. One place it's call Channel 2, in another it's SATA 2, in another it's SATA 3 and in another it's 2.1.M. If that's not confusing enough, you have to worry about whether SATA 2 is referring to the SATA Bank 1 or 2 or whether it's the SATA 2 protocol.

So I spent last night making drawing of my machine and carefully unplugging the drives and rebooting the machine painstakingly mapping everything out for today's rebuild. It's at 51% right now. It's been running for four hours. I really hope it works this time.