Aging Gracefully (Or Not)
A hard week on the hardware front.
So I woke up this morning, the best description for how everything tastes is “robot poo”, and for the very first time I had to do this:
And then I was presented with this:
Both of those images were captured with the seven year old iPhone 8 with a display that failed halfway through a day trip earlier this week to get some of my fifty seven year old equipment inspected by a specialist. I still managed to limp, figuratively and literally, into the doctor’s office with three minutes to spare. I got the phone home, got it on power, and it’s been OK since, but my trust is gone.
I had to make myself a little visual aid before I opened the Z420 …
And I’m beyond annoyed to find that slot 4 is inhabited by the cheapest bit of kit in the machine - a $16 card that adds two additional 6Gbps SATA ports to the system. If you look at the bottom right corner of the mainboard you can see two gray SATA ports, which are 6 Gbps, and the four white ports next to them are 3Gbps SAS/SATA hybrid.
The whole motivation with these cards was squeezing a bit more juice out of machines that were nine years old at the time I did this and there WAS a bit of a benefit. But now I’m deeply displeased that what’s attached to that card are the mirrored pair of Western Digital RED 1TB NAS drives that are my main workspace.
Conclusion:
This isn’t the worst thing in the world. I moved the card to slot 1 to see if that helps and if it does fail completely I’ll be messing around in single user move as I move those drives back to the motherboard connections. Since the file system is ZFS there’s no worry associated with the failure, the data is safe no matter how it happens.
There are a lot of things in motion in my world, hardware wise. The fund raiser in Artificial Intelligence For Disinfodrome was successful, bringing in about $450. But since that post a chat group has formed and maybe instead of a rack mount there will be a newer workstation in an office in the Bay Area. It’s all very new, very unformed, but having a machine to hold Disinfodrome’s collection of 3.5” NAS drives is definitely a requirement.