So it all started with an ominous message on my screen - "RAID not recognized." Not good. Not good at all. In a moment of brilliance, and a quest for performance, I had configured my dual 120gb Seagate Barracuda's for RAID 0. Which is great, until one of the hard drives winks off. And then basically both of your hard drives are out action and worthless. And then you're not so brilliant.

Conscious that my wife had been on my case to back up our data ("yeah yeah I'll get to it"), I began to sweat and plan my escape to Mexico. Luckily my brother-in-law was in town, and he is way more knowledgeable about these sorts of things. The solution was to delete the RAID definition, then recreate it. Which worked. But we definitely paused over that "Y" button ...

So first thing to do was pull out those DVD's and start burning. Burn baby burn ...

Then I realized that I had actually put our data on a third 60gb hard drive, and that we were actually ok. So I relaxed. After I burned the DVDs. A few night later, a loud sick grinding noise emanated from my PC. It rapidly increased then volume, then tapered off like a whimpering dog. ??? After I began to breathe again, I though "Ok, whatever that was, that was not good." The computer then politely informed me that my third drive had gone off on a smoke break. And it probably would not be coming back. "This rocks! Not! So not!"

So I surrender, and pull out my credit card. Off to pick up another drive (300gb Seagata Barracuda) to replace the dead 60gb (*cough* IBM *cough*), and then an external 200gb hard drive. And while I'm at it, I pick up a pocket 5gb hard drive. Schaweet.

So it looks like I'm stable (for now.) However I discovered a pitfall to moving your data from one drive to another. I use Adobe's Photoshop Album to organize my pictures. It's a nice program, and I really like the ability to have mutiple tags and sort criteria. Unfortunately, Photoshop Album uses Access for its database, and the location of all your pictures (including the edits) are hardwired in that database. It does have a "reconnect" feature, but you have to reconnect each photo one at a time. Considering I have over 4,000 pics, this was not a good option for me. So it was off to the forums to see if I could figure out another way. The solution was to go into the database and search and replace, which I was comfortable doing. But I started thinking, what if you were just a regular person who had no idea what a database was? Adobe did provide a work around, but that method required to reimport all your photos. Which meant you lost all your tagging and edit info. Yeah, thank you ... In this day and age, the program should be flexible on where you store your photos.

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Published: (2005-04-11 15:13:25.0)