This is a somewhat old story but it will lead into a more current one in Part 2 shortly.
Over Christmas Kelly and I went to visit my parents in Pittsburgh, PA. We left the morning of Wednesday December 22 and returned Sunday December 26. When we left everything tech wise was working pretty well in the house. However when we got back a sequence of events started unfolding to make that no longer true.
We arrived home to find the arcade / Windows Media Center computer dead. This computer records all the stuff we watch on normal over the air networks and feeds it to the Xbox 360 to allow us to watch it on the big screen in basement. The computer wouldn’t even boot up and it appeared the main drive was dead. I tried various methods to recover the drive with almost no success. Luckily that drive only housed the operating system and non of the real data other than what was scheduled to record. All the data was on other drives. I went out on Monday and bought an Intel 40 GB SSD to replace the dead drive and get the machine working. After a few hours and some reconfiguration I got everything working again. I also later found out the original drive had a 5 year rather than 3 year warranty so I got it replaced as well.
While I was getting the arcade OS drive replaced I finally got the failed half of my 1 TB mirror for server replaced as well. It actually had died a long time ago (like years) but I had never replaced it since the online RMA page wouldn’t process it. I tried it again since they were both Western Digital drives and it actually worked this time. I got both drives on Wednesday and was still off work thankfully so I could get them installed.
Also on Wednesday the hard drive in my Series 3 TiVo decided it was also time to quit working. This was not totally a surprise since the TiVo had a few freezing / garbled picture / rebooting issues before. This time however it would boot and only work for about 10 minutes at a time. Knowing it was dying and not wanting to push my luck I immediately removed the drive and started determining what to do. This was also a WD drive and was still under warranty so I started a third RMA. The replacement drive arrived on Friday. After a couple of false starts and a good dose of patience I was able to copy 95-99% of the failing drive to the replacement. Luckily the lost parts were in recordings and not the operating system part of the drives. I think we lost a few minutes of a few shows but not much really.
The final problem occurred within a week, not sure of exact day. Half of my OS 150 GB mirror in server failed as I was doing a consistency check on the mirror set. As of today (2/19/2011) I still haven’t replaced this drive via RMA with WD (yes again), however I may do it now for reasons you will see in Part 2.
On short note on Western Digital. You may think by reading this that their drives are junk and prone to failure, but I would really disagree. Most of these drives have been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for almost 3 or more years. They served me well for quite a while. Also the RMA process of getting a replacement no questions asked in 48 hours max can’t be beat.
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