External Storage, Part 3

In which it gets really sucky. Last summer I wrote about my new Buffalo TeraStation, a half-terabyte of network storage that I inherited from the office. I quickly moved my entire photo archive over, and started using it as advertised.

A week or so ago it stopped responding. I couldn’t get the shares up on the network, couldn’t bring up the web interface or even ping it. I spent about an hour on the phone with the tech support guys stopping-and-starting the thing, trying unsuccessfully to put firmware patches on it, and just generally being miserable. The continuously flashing red light seemed, it seemed, to indicate a failure on the motherboard. Mother*****, I said.

As fate would have it, there was a duplicate chassis at the office, which I was allowed to take just like the first one. After spending a solid hour-plus I was able to take out the hard drives from the new one, and put my old hard drives into position. I turned it on, waited, and …

Same problem. So it’s back to the drawing board with the tech guys, from whom I somehow have to get help retrieving my files. If someone tries to tell you RAID is a great storage option, well it’s flakier than anything.