pc 101 – Watts Family

More with the NAS

Back in April, I posted about coming home to a beeping NAS. Well, it happened again. To the very same drive, I installed in April of this year! That’s right. See the graph above from my Synology OS showing the increasing number of bad sectors on the HD over 7 months. I replaced the WD Gold 4TB drive with a Red 4TB 7200RPM drive. Hopefully, it will fair better. I also turned on a weekly in-depth test that will email me if anything really bad comes up again.

While researching for this issue I noticed a lot of confusion in forums and on discussion boards stating that you manufacturers like Western Digitial will not take back a drive that has “a few” bad sectors. I don’t believe this is true. I have returned drives in the past for this same issue, just bad sectors. This drive had 26 which I consider being a lot of bad sectors. When plugged into my iMac it would not initialize at all.

If you are not sure about sending a drive in for RMA, I encourage you to at least try it. Worst case scenario, they send the drive back to you. You only lost a bit of shipping costs, still cheaper than a new HD.

Also, use common sense when looking at the numbers. My NAS said 26 bad sectors was fine, but I knew better. Don’t believe the system, after all the defaults for the number of bad sectors may be set to null or to 100.

NAS Woes

We just got back from vacation and after turning back on NAS I get beeps! Not what you want to hear when powering on after a week of having the server off.

So new hard drive is ordered and I’m $200 dollars poorer, but all my digital files will be a little safer in a few days. Disk 1 is the drive that went out and it was the first one installed of course so, makes sense I guess. The best part is because of RAID 5 nothing was lost and the system continues to run.

With Prime from Amazon, It will be back up Monday night. I’m currently doing a secure erase on the bad drive. Then I’ll take it out and dust the whole enclosure while throwing out the old drive. #ITdad

Hackintosh

I got this old Dell Inspiron B130 from my sister-in-law and I wanted to see if I could install Mac OS X on it. Well, I could, but I also have to keep this paperclip in the VGA port all the time. Not a great solution. So tomorrow its Ubuntu. I just wanted to see if this could be done. It was fun, for a geek like me.

Stop Facebook…get your privacy back

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Audio problems with iTunes 7.5

I just had to uninstall QuickTime and re-install it because I got this audio configuration error while trying to install iTunes 7.5. It is really not meant to be used on a Windows box. For everyone else who is having this problem here is the solution. What a pain in the butt. Thanks a lot Apple!