![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneMy current iMac has a 3 TB drive, and I have two 3 TB drives that I back up to. Unfortunately, as my iMac has only about 500 gig or so free, that means my Time Machine backups don't go back as far as I'd like. I'm two weeks away from my first weekly paycheck coming in, and I'm planning on buying a 6 TB bare drive and a second in January, then relegating the 3 TBs to laptop backup duties.
Sadly, since getting back from our Thanksgiving trip, I keep getting 'Drive was not ejected properly' errors. My computer and the drives are plugged in to a UPS, and since my computer is not crashing, that means there's a problem in the drive, the interface electronics, or its power supply.
*sigh*
Since it's the start of the month, I'll send this drive to the observatory with my wife tonight to swap with its companion, and we'll see if the problem continues. That'll tell me if it's the power supply, which is unlikely. Wallwart failure is pretty rare.
My laptop backups were a pair of 1 TB drives back when our two laptops both sported 500 gig drives. Now my wife's laptop has a 1 TB SSD, and I'm planning on upgrading mine to the same. The current drives just can't cope, so they're only getting backed up to a single 5 TB drive that lives in a fire-proof lockbox here in the house. As a bit of a paranoid former network administrator, nothing is backed up properly until there's a copy off-site, thus, copies go to the observatory, 20 miles away.
Curiously, the failing 3 TB is the newer of the 3 TB pair! Western Digital made a cosmetic change to the case, so it's easy to tell the difference. I find it failing before its partner to be kind of odd. It's been my experience to expect one of these four drives to fail every year, but come to think of it, it's been a couple of years since I replaced one. And now the newest drive is failing!
The replacement will be a Hitachi data center-rated bare drive, it'll live in one of those drop-in docking cradles. Both my iMac and my wife's laptop support USB 3, as does the cradle, so those laptops will be blazing fast. My laptop? Well, it's a 2011 model, so not so fast. And when I get the second 6 TB drive, I can migrate my Movies directory to it and free up some 800 gig from my iMac!
The ultimate solution will be to get a small NAS box that I can RAID and back up (and that's a tech that I'm not really familiar with), but that's only going to be if I can find something good really cheap, and if the job persists longer than I think it might.
Sadly, since getting back from our Thanksgiving trip, I keep getting 'Drive was not ejected properly' errors. My computer and the drives are plugged in to a UPS, and since my computer is not crashing, that means there's a problem in the drive, the interface electronics, or its power supply.
*sigh*
Since it's the start of the month, I'll send this drive to the observatory with my wife tonight to swap with its companion, and we'll see if the problem continues. That'll tell me if it's the power supply, which is unlikely. Wallwart failure is pretty rare.
My laptop backups were a pair of 1 TB drives back when our two laptops both sported 500 gig drives. Now my wife's laptop has a 1 TB SSD, and I'm planning on upgrading mine to the same. The current drives just can't cope, so they're only getting backed up to a single 5 TB drive that lives in a fire-proof lockbox here in the house. As a bit of a paranoid former network administrator, nothing is backed up properly until there's a copy off-site, thus, copies go to the observatory, 20 miles away.
Curiously, the failing 3 TB is the newer of the 3 TB pair! Western Digital made a cosmetic change to the case, so it's easy to tell the difference. I find it failing before its partner to be kind of odd. It's been my experience to expect one of these four drives to fail every year, but come to think of it, it's been a couple of years since I replaced one. And now the newest drive is failing!
The replacement will be a Hitachi data center-rated bare drive, it'll live in one of those drop-in docking cradles. Both my iMac and my wife's laptop support USB 3, as does the cradle, so those laptops will be blazing fast. My laptop? Well, it's a 2011 model, so not so fast. And when I get the second 6 TB drive, I can migrate my Movies directory to it and free up some 800 gig from my iMac!
The ultimate solution will be to get a small NAS box that I can RAID and back up (and that's a tech that I'm not really familiar with), but that's only going to be if I can find something good really cheap, and if the job persists longer than I think it might.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-02 04:40 pm (UTC)Google Cloud is really cheap; somewhere around a penny per GB-month. (I presume Azure and Big River are, too, but Google's what I went with.) Noticeable for all the photos but for about a gigabyte of lifetime writing output? Good meteorite insurance.
I suspect you've got a lot of photos as a major concern, but if you're comfy with how well you can encrypt them, even quite a lot of "mustn't lose this" financial data can go to the cloud for a long time before you hit the price of a hard drive.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-02 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-03 08:27 am (UTC)CYa!
Mako
no subject
Date: 2017-12-03 12:55 pm (UTC)Unfortunately I shipped that drive to the observatory with my wife last night, so I don't have access to it at the moment. I'll be bringing it home over NYE, so I'll resume mucking about with it then. (and the telescope broke last night: I was up before 5:30 this morning and my wife walked in the door before sunrise, apparently the tertiary mirror got stuck. Fortunately late enough that they didn't lose too much time on the sky.) As I recall, it didn't report anything for external USB drives, but I may be misremembering.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-04 06:13 am (UTC)I assume the third mirror is directing light to a spectrometer or similar?
CYa!
Mako
no subject
Date: 2017-12-04 11:45 am (UTC)Most telescopes mount their instruments in-line with the secondary mirror, what's known as the Casegrain(sp?) Focus. My wife's uses what's known as a Naisesmith Port, mounted in the fork of the telescope, and the tertiary bends the light at a right angle over to it. The old method requires several hours and a lot of work to change the instrument, on my wife's telescope you can change the instrument in an average of about 10 minutes! On the first page of my photo gallery of the observatory, there's four photos of what the port looks like without an instrument connected to it, 1770-1772 are the first three. They have multiple spectrometers and IR cameras that look at different wavelengths or have other special features. Some of these photos are 14 years old, so several instruments have been retired and been replaced. http://waynewestphotography.com/gallery/index.php?/category/3
no subject
Date: 2017-12-05 07:29 am (UTC)Yep, I believe the Subaru scope on Mauna Kea also supports a 3rd mirror setup, Mrs. TheWayne would likely know authoritatively...
TY for the photo link too, I'll check that out once things calm down a bit here :)
CYa!
Mako
no subject
Date: 2017-12-05 11:47 am (UTC)I took LOTS of pix at the observatory when I started hanging at there! (kids with toys...). Mrs. TheWayne (I love how you put that!) bought me a Digital Rebel when we were dating, and I shot the daylights out of that camera. Which reminds me, I need to remember to pick up that camera when I'm in Phoenix: there's a shop in Florida that will remove the hi-pass filter and re-focus the camera, turning it in to an IR-only DSLR and the effect is really cool. I should go up and do some more shooting at the National Solar Telescope: I found out that it's RIP on January 1. My neighbor is/has lost his job over this, I don't know if he's gotten picked up for the next generation of its life, or if there will be a next gen.