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Network Attached Storage

Death and taxes

It’s said that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes. If the panama papers taught us anything, it’s that taxes aren’t actually a certainty for everyone. That leaves death. Recently my beloved 3TB external hard-drive had an appointment with the grim reaper.

S-ATA / USB interface for the external drive.

Resurrection?

I have at least passing familiarity with certain recovery tools, such as testdisk but alas, it was to no avail. The partition table was destroyed and I couldn’t rebuild it, change it, reformat the drive, or anything. Resurrection is likely still possible, but beyond my current abilities. Fortunately I had recent backups of most of my stuff, so I lost very little of any appreciable value.

The deceased drive in question

The march of progress

I could succumb to grief over my dearly departed drive, but I chose to find a suitable replacement. I decided upon procuring a NAS. This would allow me to access my stuff from multiple devices, without being directly connected to the device via cable. It also allows for some interesting projects down the road. A sort of small scale homelab kind of thing. Having some familiarity with the QNAP brand, I stuck to what I know and bought myself some 4TB Ironwolf drives and set them up in a RAID-5 configuration, so that if a drive fails, it can be replaced and will rebuild itself relatively painlessly. I’m aware this is no substitute for a proper backup however.

Excerpt from the QNAP dashboard
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