It’s been a hell of a week

Last year, I dropped a chunk of change on a Pegasus2 RAID box to store all my data on. It has been a great device since then, until earlier this week when a drive died in the RAID. Now, the Pegasus was configured as a RAID 5, so it should have just kept chugging away until I was able to replace the disk. That’s why I spent the money on it, after all, so a drive failure wouldn’t keep me from getting work done. Unfortunately, the Pegasus instead started to fail itself, throwing I/O errors to the system for days before finally failing the disk out of the volume. I can’t count how much time I spent trying to figure out where the hell the sporadic beach balls were coming from, including reinstalling the OS, twice.

I’ve been going back and forth with Promise about it, and we still haven’t gotten anywhere. The Pegasus did finally kick the drive, so now the volume is accessible again, but I have 0 confidence in the device itself or the content that is currently on there. I have backups, so at least that isn’t a problem.

But now I’m in the middle of damage control. Yesterday I ordered a new disk for the failed one in the Pegasus, shipping it next day air. Of course I ordered the 5900 RPM drive instead of the 7200 RPM one, which is partly my stupid mistake for not realizing and partly due to Seagate not being explicit with the spindle speed in their products anymore. Back that goes to Amazon today (which as the silver lining of this story actually refunded me the entire cost of the drive plus the extra I paid for next day shipping, amazing customer service and kudos to Amazon!). The correct drive is on its way to me and will be here tomorrow.

Beyond that, I ordered a new 6TB drive to store all my data until I’m satisfied that the Pegasus is back online and reliable again. That is set to arrive here tomorrow as well.

Like I said, a hell of a week. The Apple TV Dev Kit arrived in the middle of all this, but unfortunately I haven’t had a development Mac or the time to work with it yet. In the end, here’s how I’m seeing the score:

Me: -1 (for purchasing the wrong drive) Apple: +1 (for shipping the Dev Kits so quickly) Seagate: -5 (for no longer listing drive RPM in their product specs) Amazon: +10 (for going above and beyond in customer service) Pegasus: -20 (for dying in the exact situation I spent extra money to avoid) Promise: ? (still don’t know how they are going to handle my Pegasus failure)