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first production hard drive failure
Monday, July 29 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
[REDACTED]
When I was trying to listen to music this morning, the share from the media server kept disappearing. In frustration, I removed the 8TB hard drive from the media server and attached it directly to my workstation Woodchuck. But the unreliability continued. If I let the drive cool down for a bit, I could get maybe thirty seconds of use out of it before it would disappear again. I've owned a lot of hard drives in my life, but I've never had one in production go bad during its useful life (that is, in the time between when I first confirmed that it was working reliably and when I finally retired it, usually because it had been supplanted by something several times larger). But it was looking like this drive was indeed failing while I was still using it. Since its problem seemed to be heat-related (that is, I could access any part of the hard drive I wanted to if I just did so in a brief period after the drive was started), it was possible that the problem was not with any of the mechanical parts of the drive but was instead with the electronics of its controller board. So I immediatly bought an exact replacement on eBay, which cost me $129.59 after tax (not bad, I thought). When that arrives, I will swap the controller board onto the failing drive and hope it continues working. Because if that doesn't fix it, I've basically lost everything on that drive. It won't be a huge loss; its only unique material is the media I've decided to keep since I got that drive three years ago, since the drive it replaced, with all the media from before that time, is still in working condition. (I use it as media drive at the cabin.)
Today I put a lot of work into details of the ESP8266 Remote Control reporting system, as I'd been frustrated by a few issues. Unlike in other reporting systems I've built, most of its form generation is being done in PHP in the backend instead of by Javascript in the frontend, and that's caused some issues with getting data from the backend to the frontend for certain Javascript-only features, particularly the CodeMirror syntax highlighter. I started today's work by dumping all the info needed for form generation into a Javascript variable and then using that to replace the ad hoc system I'd built to get that to the frontend. This made it easy to finally get hooks into CodeMirror to allow frontend validation of JSON and SQL, which were two of the things I really wanted to get working. Later I could add features allowing the existing method of specifying the dimensions of textareas to also affect the CodeMirror editors that supplant them. By this evening, I was adding backend code to report SQL errors to the user when running reports.
At 3:00pm, I took Charlotte for another walk up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, though this time I didn't see chanterelles at all. Once I got back, I took a somewhat lukewarm bath, which is nice even in the hottest weather.
Meanwhile Gretchen had a meeting with our old friend Carrie (of Carrie and Michæl), from whom Gretchen has been estranged for about three years. Gretchen had sent her an email some months back saying how hurt Carrie's friend-breakup had made her. This has resulted, a month later, in a reply. And now they were actually having a meeting.
I didn't know whether or not they were having dinner, but I made spaghetti anyway. I didn't eat any until Gretchen got home, though. I ate cucumbers instead. (I've been eating a lot of those of late.) When Gretchen returned, she said the meeting with Carrie had gone very well, and now it's looking like Charlotte and her new eight-month-old dog will soon be having a playdate. (Carrie and Michæl's old dog Penny died during the estrangement, as did our dog Ramona.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240729 feedback
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