The Daily Parker

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Shutting it all down

Right before Christmas I removed all the long-dormant servers from the Inner Drive Technology Worldwide Data Center. Today I'd planned to shut off the last two live devices, my domain controller and my TeraStation network attached storage (NAS) appliance, replacing the first with nothing and the second with a new NAS.

(The NAS is the little black box on the floor to the right; the domain controller is the thin rack-mounted server at the top.)

It turns out, today was a good day to shut down the old NAS. When I logged into its UI, I discovered that one of its disks had failed, cutting its capacity by a third. Fortunately, I configured the device with 4 x 256 GB drives in RAID 5. This meant that when one of the drives failed, the other three kept the data alive just fine, but the array lost 128 GB of space and a whole lot of speed.

The new NAS cost $200 and has 4 TB of space—almost 6 times more than the old, ailing NAS. I'll have a photo of it when I put it in its permanent home next weekend. (Right now there's a server rack in the way, and right now it's busy getting completely loaded.)

For perspective: the TeraStation cost $900 in May 2006. It's run nearly continuously since then, which means three of the drives lasted about 67,000 hours, with an amortized cost of 32c per day.

I'll discuss how much damage to a network killing the domain causes once I'm done cleaning up the debris.

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