Computer Woes

[Mike Farley]

By now I had got to the stage where my NAS was setup for my requirements, but it was very slow. The initial backup had taken 36 hours as I had connected the NAS to my system using the switch built into the modem router supplied by my ISP. Being a network device, the NAS cannot be connected directly to the computer unlike a USB device. To save money, and it is probably a matter of just a few pence per unit, ISPs typically pare back the network connection to 10/100 which means that maximum throughput is 100 megabits per second. This sounds like a lot and is adequate for low volume tasks, but is far less than the maximum throughput of which the NAS is capable.

The answer was to purchase a gigabyte switch, which runs 10x faster and I found a low cost Netgear device which suited my needs. At this point, I experienced my first surprise. I phoned the PC World helpline to check that the device would be suitable and on a Sunday morning got someone who was reasonably knowledgeable. I remember the PC World of old, when prices were high and the staff knew nothing of what they were selling, although to be fair to the company those days are long gone. The telephone support guy was reasonably confident, but suggested checking in store. The first person I encountered at the store did not know, but quickly found someone who did, although he did suggest phoning the helpline to confirm! In any event, PC World was willing to let me bring back an opened box if the switch did not meet my needs, so I bought it.

The second surprise was that when I plugged everything in, it all worked. No head scratching or pulling hair out, it just functioned exactly as it should. Something of a novelty given my recent experiences. The second complete backup, which was necessary due to the previously described issue with the NAS initialisation process, took 12 hours.

[Mike Farley]

By now, I had a complete backup of my data on the NAS drive and it was time to reformat the data disk on my PC to ensure that there would be no further problems. Before doing this, I reconfigured it to be a 4TB RAID 0 device rather than 2 TB RAID 1 as previously. This meant that it matched the capacity of the 4 TB NAS and that I would have three separate copies of my data. I then restored my data from the NAS.

There is an outstanding issue with the motherboard BIOS in that my PC will not now boot if I set the RAID parameter on. So far as I can tell, this is due to the new SSD, but all the seems to do is allow the RAID configuration utility to become available during the boot process. Afterwards I set it to AHCP and all seems to be fine, with the RAID drive functioning as expected. I did update the BIOS to see if the problem had been fixed, although that introduced yet another complication. The manual does not state how the BIOS should be updated, but there is documentation on the website. It is incorrect. A "howto" document is included with the BIOS update download and that does not work either. In the end, I simply worked it out for myself, but it was a worrying moment as a corrupted BIOS is not necessarily recoverable. For this very reason the general advice is not to update the BIOS unless you have to.

At some point in the future, I will purchase another 2 TB disk and will convert the internal RAID 0 disk to RAID 5. In this configuration, data is written across two of the disks and a checksum written to the third. If either of the data disks fails, the missing information can be reconstructed from the checksum and the arrangement ensures that there is redundancy which is not available with RAID 0. I will also add a 4 TB external disk for backup which can be kept at a separate location away from the computer. Five copies should be sufficient, hopefully.

[Mike Farley]

One of my concerns was that products which require activation and which could not be deactivated due to the sudden nature of the SSD failure could not be subsequently reactivated. So far, all has been well and I have not had to get in touch with any suppliers. Lightroom and Photoshop CC reinstalled and the warning that I would have to logout these applications from my other computer did not materialise. I have a three licence version of F-Secure anti-virus and had to reconfirm the activation on two of the three computers on which it is installed. I reactivated Windows 7 twice within a short period and Office 2007 was also OK. The only question mark hangs over Phase One's Capture One Express, which grants two licences but so far I have only installed it on my desktop PC.