Tonight after settling down from the projects of the day I decided to find out why my Macbook Pro stopped backing up to my Time Machine drive that is attached to my airport extreme. Well at first I guessed that I must have interrupted a backup and the SMB server on the airport had the image locked so I tried resetting the airport. Because my airport is in the basement I tried my pseudo power cycle trick of changing a setting on the airport and then letting it soft reboot. When it came back on line the airport was showing an issue with one of the drives connected to it. It said that I would need to run the disk utility on it. So I went down stairs and grabbed my back up drive, a Western Digital passport drive. Right away I knew I was in trouble. The little white LED was not on. When I plugged it into my laptop I instantly knew is was toast, I could feel the platters spin up and then I could hear the head jumping back and forth making that all familiar zip, zip, zip,... noise.
So now I need to replace the drive. I looked and a 1TB drive will run me about $60 bucks, not to bad and I'll be right back where I started. Then I saw a 3TB WD MY Cloud that connects to directly to the network through gigabit ethernet it was not a bad price $178, about the same price per TB. It would be nice to get all of my movies back on the network. But then I got to thinking that I would be stuck with a useless network box even if only one of the internal drives died, it is not so easy to just drop in a new drive and go forth. So now I'm thinking of going back to a linux box setup like I had a few years ago. It was an old pentinum 4 box that ran 24/7/365 for the better part of 8 years. If I go this route I can just replace a drive when it fails and then keep going. I just built a little computer to run as an Sophos router for less than $160 a few month ago and I'm thinking it would make a good file server.
Parts are listed below. About the only thing I would change is the amount of ram, I would more than likely go with 8GB of ram over the 4GB. What do you all think? Yes I know a giant NAS would be awesome but I'm on a small budget of about of no more than $200.
So now I need to replace the drive. I looked and a 1TB drive will run me about $60 bucks, not to bad and I'll be right back where I started. Then I saw a 3TB WD MY Cloud that connects to directly to the network through gigabit ethernet it was not a bad price $178, about the same price per TB. It would be nice to get all of my movies back on the network. But then I got to thinking that I would be stuck with a useless network box even if only one of the internal drives died, it is not so easy to just drop in a new drive and go forth. So now I'm thinking of going back to a linux box setup like I had a few years ago. It was an old pentinum 4 box that ran 24/7/365 for the better part of 8 years. If I go this route I can just replace a drive when it fails and then keep going. I just built a little computer to run as an Sophos router for less than $160 a few month ago and I'm thinking it would make a good file server.
Parts are listed below. About the only thing I would change is the amount of ram, I would more than likely go with 8GB of ram over the 4GB. What do you all think? Yes I know a giant NAS would be awesome but I'm on a small budget of about of no more than $200.
| Items Ordered | Price | |
| 1 of: ASUS DDR3 2200 Intel LGA 1155 Motherboard H61M-E Sold by: Amazon.com LLC Condition: New |
$49.69 | |
| 1 of: Intel Pentium Dual Core G2030 LGA 1155 Processor BX80637G2030 Sold by: Amazon.com LLC Condition: New |
$57.95 | |
| 2 of: Crucial 2GB Single DDR3 1600 MT/s PC3-12800 CL11 Unbuffered UDIMM 240-Pin Desktop Memory Module CT25664BA160B Sold by: Amazon.com LLC Condition: New |
$23.23 | |