One simply does not RAID the SUL

Yes, this is yet another variant of what I consider to be the Aragorn meme, the one from I believe the third Lord of the Rings movie in which he says, "One does not simply walk into Mordor".

This past Monday, I was going to watch a movie on one of the PCs in the Secret Underground Lair (SUL). This particular Win XP PC did not have the necessary CODECs to view DVDs, so I downloaded the VLC player and inserted my movie Bolweiser (the English release was called "The Stationmaster's Wife). I think I was prompted to reboot after the VLC install, and when I did, the PC refused to restart. Whatever, I thought, and popped the DVD into a Win 7 PC which had no problem playing the movie. I watched a good part of the movie, and was moderately disappointed- I'm not a videot, but I like to be entertained when I watch a movie. This might have been a bit high-brow for me... dunno, but in any case it was a movie that had been on my "to watch" list which I could now safely scratch off!

In any event, the following morning I rebooted the PC. Nothing. I rebooted into the setup mode, and ran diagnostics on the HDD- I think it failed in ~5 seconds. Now, I'm not particularly cynical, but I was under the impression that modern HDDs had diagnostics built in which gave a user a warning when they were failing? Well, maybe some do, but not this one.

What could I do? In light of the impending end of Win XP support, and having already scheduled this PC for a Win 7 upgrade, not a single tear was shed. I reran the test in Mr. T's presence for his edification (as we share this PC), and then ordered a 1TB Western Digital drive from Amazon (*their #1 best seller in HDDs, apparently). Not long after doing this, I considered adding a RAID to this system, a Level 5 RAID. After doing some research, I was disappointed to discover that a software RAID 5 is not supported in Win 7. Four letter words! (*for non-native English speakers: most obscenities in English seem to be spelled with four letters, so if one sees a reference to a "four letter word", it generally refers to an obscenity).

Ack! Truth be told, my backup on this PC had been a bit sloppy... most of my  "important" data was backed up or duplicated elsewhere. The only real data I lost was ~15 months of pedometer data. Not huge, but still a bummer.

The new drive arrived late Friday evening, just as I was getting ready for work. I unpacked it and took it to the Secret Underground Lair, giving it the opportunity to adjust to the ambient conditions. When I got off work on Saturday morning, I installed it in the drive cage, connected the power and data cables, and then buttoned up the PC. I then installed a fresh copy of Win 7.

So here I sit, approximately twelve hours later posting my first blog entry on a Win 7 box. All is good- Avast, Steam and Chrome are installed. The widely-reported non-availability of the software implementation  RAID 5 on Win 7 is a bit of a blow, but since I don't want to spend another +100 USD on a decent quality RAID controller, I'm going to Plan B: permanently attached external backup, with optical backups as needed.

Alas and alack, as data and life intersect, I have no new juicy data news to report; then again, maybe my misadventure in BackupLand will be a warning and a lesson for someone... before you, too, lose fifteen months worth of pedometer data!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.