bits over here bits over there

[solarbird]

It’s my birthday! At least, my legal one. There’s another date which is candidate for Actual Birthdate, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

And I’m spending it moving boxes and files and hard drives. YAY. I can’t entirely believe I’m still moving files around from the techsplosion and Ubuntu upgrade farce, but I am. No, no additional hard drives have failed, we seem to be past that for the moment. But new drives mean larger drives mean the old backup drives aren’t big enough anymore means moving things around means playing Towers of Hammurabi with archives.

And y’know, moving a few hundred gigs at a time over USB2? That’s… not the fastest thing ever.

Home stretch, tho’. Home stretch. I should set up a Hall of Remembrance for all the dead drives. The Lord of All Drives could preside over it.

17 Years Good Service

Seriously, that’s the weird little what-is-this-doing-here 2G hard drive from lodestone that was serving as lodestone’s swap. I looked it up. It’s seventeen years old. And in fine working order! I figure that makes it RULER OF ALL HARD DRIVES, because damn.

And on a not-entirely-dissimilar note, what do I do with 160 and 40 gig EIDE hard drives in good working order, anyway? The small one is really slow, to be honest – it’s a total dog – so it kind of sucks and I’m not unwilling to drill it, but the 160g is reasonably fast and low milage and everything! What do you do with stuff like that?

I also have three dead drives, and one 500G EDIE drive that got yanked but which I’m putting into a housing and back into service in a new capacity. (Archives.) That’s six hard drives I’ve had to pull out of machines to get this all back together.

“Digital is forever,” they say. “Once it’s online, it’s eternal.” What a load of crap. Reality? Everything is super fragile and needs constant maintenance.

Even if you’re not a supervillain.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

Comments

[angelwolfgeek]

Old school is a bit of a dog. There's precious little that still uses em, and I have a boxful of old drives that probably still work.

I'd probably wipe em (shred's good, or dban) before doing anything else. Its as good as drilling (unless you're worried about secret government agencies so secret their TLA is classifed) .I'd also format em with some error checking option and run smart checks to see how trustworthy they are.

If I didn't then rehome them, I'd probably then find some old box that happens to need em and use em for transient storage - the stuff that I have a backup elsewhere, but I want a local copy anyway to use *now* - freenas might be nice for that, especially if you set it up to sleep when not in use, and wake it up with wake on lan.

probably should but

[solarbird]

I've definitely decided to save them (for now) as replacement candidates for door and newmoon. Those are old motherboards - door is a p166(!) that we're going to keep running Because We Can - and EIDE-only. And currently door is only 15G, and newmoon is like 120G, so both of these drives (which are fairly lightly used) are larger than what's in there now.

So, yeah, lulz of various sorts.

Oh, and I lack an unused external housing for EIDE, so I'm just going to wrap-and-label them for now. If that means drilling them later, that's okay, that won't be a first.