Category: Computers

I’ve had my Norco DS-1220 for six or seven months now and have some time to adjust to it and really feel out it’s performance. When I first setup the system (transitioning from the Thecus), I had a 2TB RAID 5 array built with 5 500GB Western Digital Caviars. When the array was at around 95% capacity I decided to add more storage and began looking for the most cost effective way to do that. I always use generic 3.5″ drives and I usually pay as close to $100 each for them as possible. Typically when the time comes for me to add storage it makes sense to double my capacity and Murhpy’s law always seems to work out that drives twice as large as the one I am replacing are at about $100 each.… Click here to read more!

The DS-1220 is great. It was dead easy to setup and has caused me to trouble at all. I installed Fedora 8 in the days leading up to the delivery the the DS-1220 based solely on the fact that I saw something on the web that said the controller card worked in Fedora. Come to find out the drivers for the card are actually available in the current kernel and most distributions are coming with the driver available as a module. I did nothing to setup or install the Norco DS-1220 at all.

Let me take a short step back and bring you through the torment that got me to this place.… Click here to read more!

Well, I have placed an order for the Norco DS-1220. I ordered it from Newegg.com as an open box item. It’s a bit of a gamble, for couple of reason. The first is because open box from Newegg means someone sent it back. It may have all of it’s parts, it may be missing some parts. Newegg will not help you out if the package is incomplete.. but it did save me $180. Newegg does offer a 15 day return policy on the item though so if it shows up and is missing some critical I can send it back and buy the non-open box version, albeit it at te $180 premium.… Click here to read more!

You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.

Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array.… Click here to read more!

Wow, this is getting old. 36 days in and I’ve had another drive fail.. only not really. Sure the N5200 thinks it’s failed but if I pull the disk out and pop in back in, the array rebuilds and all is well. The logs show no errors on the drive, no bad reads or writes, it just disappears. What a wonderful device it is….

Also, even though the email test functions work the N5200 still does not send me email when something like this happens. I still have to log in every few days and check manually. Very nice….

Toplakr