The sounds of hard drives that have perished
These sounds are only frightening or scary if you imagine your precious data only exists on that failing drive. If you make consistent and frequent backups and/or you run a fault-tolerant RAID flavour, it is but a nuisance.
Nowadays you can buy a 1 TB harddrive for less than 100 euro's . So I build myself a 4 TB NAS box, which is already 50% full. However, although it is to some degree fault-tollerant by using RAID 6, one mistake or catastrophic hardware faillure and all data is lost.
And that's where the 'problem' start. For every € spend on storage, you may need another € to secure that storage.
You can choose to take and accept the risk outlined earlier and not to make backups. However, if you do want to make backups of terrabytes of storage, how are you going to pull that off without too much cost?
In my opinion, the only reliable and usable solution is to build a second NAS box and sync the two. Ideally, both machines reside at different locations, but hey, I'm talking about a home solution, not a professional environment. Although you might ask why on earth you need 4 TB of space at home in the first place.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that although storage in itself is cheap, if you want to keep all that data safe, storage is far more expensive than you might think.
Get the 'open source' driver from www.highpoint-tech.com. (It's not open source, it uses a closed binary driver.)
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA/bios_rr2320.htm
Install the kernel headers if you haven't already
- apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.18-6-k7
- extract the downloaded driver with tar xzf
- cd product/rr232x/linux
- type 'make'
As of 28 september 2008, this gives no errors.
However, a 'make install' will fail. This is cause by the fact that the installation script uses mkinitrd, which is obsolete: the mkinitramfs command should be used. So we have to edit a script.
**Update Dec 2009: the latest drivers do not need the following steps anymore.
- vi osm/linux/install.sh
- replace all occurrences of mkinitrd with mkinitramfs ( press : and type
%s/mkinitrd/mkinitramfs/g and then :wq)
Continue here:
- Go back to the product/rr232x/linux directory and type 'make install'.
That's it.
