Tag: replacement

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NAS Drive

At home I have a NAS drive for storing music, photos and films. It’s always on and over the last couple of months it has been making “bad” sounds. Now, I don’t often surround myself with dodgy HDD and so I wasn’t sure if it was making legitimate noises or about to die.

I logged into the Iomega ix2-200 CE on Sunday and the page that normally describes the status of the device declared that Disk 1 was having problems. The NAS Drive is kept in Raid 1 configuration by me so losing one disk isn’t much of a problem. I snuck over to Amazon and check what type I had ordered before when Disk 2 failed a few years ago. They had some of these in stock and so I clicked.

The HDD arrived Monday as expected and was quickly placed into the NAS Drive. It’s a simple affair of six screws and slide out the unit. Very simple. Once turned on the data protection was rebuilt and within three hours the system was back to operating normally.

There are a few points to note about the Iomega ix2-200 CE. Whoever now owns Iomega hasn’t maintained the legacy website. This means the NAS drive tries to check for firmware updates on a site that doesn’t exist. Whenever I log in to the UI I am told it can’t check for updates. This is somewhat tiresome. It wouldn’t take much to monitor the traffic to particular sites and maintain them. I have to manually upload an update file to the NAS for it to realise it is up to date. Once it is happy it allows me access to more functions!

Overall, I am still very happy with the device and see no need to move over to a larger or newer version. The box seems to work just fine.

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It’s A Passat But Not Original

I like my car. It has enough power to be interesting and yet is also comfortable. It is rather family orientated as it’s an estate and full of old sweets and cake crumbs.

Just for fun, here’s a list of things that I’ve had changed on the car because bits broke [I am not listing things you would replace regularly]:

  • Boot door
  • Rear windscreen wiper motor
  • Front headlamp units
  • Rear light units
  • n/s wing mirror (x2)
  • n/s cv boot (x2)
  • both front springs (blame a pot hole)
  • both rear door locks
  • radiator
  • fuel injector on number 4 cylinder
  • Front VW badge

The boot currently contains two bikes, a bass guitar and some shopping bags. What else would you expect?

The wing mirror has some interesting stories [sorry, I wrote interesting, but I meant boring]. The first wing mirror replacement was needed after an incident on Christmas Eve of 2013. There had been storms the day before and various trees were knocked into Pilgrims Way near where I live. Someone had been along and cleared the trees from the road and made the journey passable. Unfortunately at one spot the tree trunk still stuck into the road by about 15cm and perfectly at wing mirror height. The first time I drove this road I noticed this and managed to avoid the tree. However, the next time I drove this way it was dark and my headlights were pretty poor [they’ve since been replaced]. As I came to the point where the tree was sticking out into the road there was a lorry driving towards me and I couldn’t move out to avoid the trunk [to be honest I had forgotten the trunk was sticking out]. I was driving the car in one direction and my wing mirror hit the truck which stubbornly refused to give way or move. My wing mirror was ripped off. A few days later as I drove past this spot I noticed a lot of wing mirrors in the hedgerow, probably in the order of 10s. There were quite a few cars in the village with their nearside mirror broken, I think that tree trunk claimed a number of kills for the week that it stuck into the road.

The next wing mirror I had to replace was because someone drove down the street too fast and clipped my mirror, it smashed the glass and the holding mechanism and so needed replacing again.

The front springs decided to die after I hit a pothole with the near side wheel and this broke the nearside front spring. I didn’t notice this at the time as the car was held up by the off side spring, although I did notice that the car was handling slightly strange. After about a day the off side spring broke on the way to work and for the last few kilometres I was driving without any suspension on the front. The car did not like the speed humps near my place of work and it didn’t like turning corners. It did look rather cool though as the front end was lowered by a few inches! A truck was called and the car got fixed [for a very tidy sum – from the garage’s point of view].

There are a few things I am expecting to need replacing over the next year or so [although I will get a newer car in 18 months so I am hoping that these bits last that time].

  • Driver’s door locking mechanism
  • Driver’s door window (it doesn’t work which makes getting car park tickets interesting)
  • n/s differential or front n/s bearing
  • Air intake trunking

Sometimes I hear a new rattle or noise from the car but I fix that by turning the stereo up a little bit more! That way my car is always working properly.

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NAS Drive Failure

On a list of things you don’t want to read [first world problems] is:

Drive 2 on this device is at risk of failing, please replace.

I guess there are worse things that this such as:

Drive 2 has failed.

Both drives have failed.

But still, it was enough to make me worry a little. My data on the NAS is organised in Raid 1 configuration so that both drives are exact copies, just in case one of them fails.

I spent some time investigating new NAS drives and making sure that I have space to expand but I think that will have to wait a few years. I would like a three or four bay device with two 2TB drives to start. I would only use Raid 1, but this configuration could potentially give me 8TB of data storage. I currently have used about 0.5 TB on the current NAS and that is after two years of ownership so I shouldn’t worry too much about needing the space until my sons get older.

I ordered a Western Digital 1TB Red drive as the WD website said that it was a suitable HDD for the ix2 series of NAS. I had planned for the whole operation to take an hour but in reality it took about 10 minutes and that was with me taking my time. Really impressed with how simple it was to replaced the drive.

Here’s the NAS.

Iomega IX2-200 CLoud Edition

After removing the two screws on the base of the device I removed the old disk 2.

Sliding out old drive

Unscrewed the old HDD from the plastic casing.

Old HDD in enclosure

Screwed the new HDD into the casing.

WD Red

Slid the new HDD and casing into the NAS enclosure and replaced the screws in the bottom of the device.

WD into NAS

Placed NAS back in its place in the “tech corner” of the house and turned it on.

After a lot of drive reading and writing it was ready for log in access and the control panel said it was rebuilding data protection [most instructions I read had said I would have to authorise this action]. I will amend this once the data rebuild is complete.

This whole process was pretty simple and I’m impressed with Iomega for the drive and am feeling quite smug at the moment.

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