Buffalo LS-WXL: Genesis

Dear future Kenny, 

In 2012 I stumbled across a great opportunity at an online store. A NAS sporting 6TB (a couple of 3TB Seagate Barracudas) going for a very friendly price. At the time it was cheaper than a single 3TB drive compared with my usual stores. 

I set it up in raid1, full redundancy and, about a year later, connected a 3TB external drive via USB that was mirroring the raid array. Times were good. I was using the NAS to backup my computers, my work, my many projects even some personal data. But suddenly sh*t hit the fan! 

First problem: one disk failed. That’s when I found out it had Seagate Barracudas, and I didn’t mind. Waited for the end of the month and suddenly the other disk also failed. I was scr*wed. I knew it as soon as the second disk mimicked the first with its clak clak clak… I turned off the external drive from the NAS and waited patiently for the end of the month to get me some new drives. 

Then something happened and I needed information stored on the external drive, connected it, disk didn’t even spin up. F*ck! Removed the disk from its enclosure – Hey! Look! Another 3TB Barracuda! -, inserted into dock and was it proclaimed deceased at the scene. Fortunately I had backed up the most important things on a server in London.  

That’s when I investigated and apparently all Seagate Barracudas 3TB were a problem. The infamous STD3000… I was flabbergasted. I should be thankful they lasted so long. 

So after that, I ended up not buying new disks and the NAS was stored appropriately in its original box. You must understand, it was somewhere closing to moving to my new apartment and I had moved most of the work to the cloud. 

Move forward 4 years to September 2018, we were cleaning up the pseudo-man-cave and the NAS looked really appealing again. I was playing around with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and the NAS would be pretty handy. So I started tinkering with it. Even installed a recent Debian distro on it! Really cool stuff! 

Now I’ve created a Kubernetes Pi cluster (x4 Pi!) and a network drive would be handy. So I brought a couple WD Red 4TB and will install the official firmware on this baby. 

You’re still listening to Dark Country?
Kenny

• Kenny
• 08/12/2018
• Blog
• 0 Comments