Airport, 1TB USB, Linux, and What A Week
My friend Dave is building a new desktop system. So I offer to sell him my dual 500GB drives so I could buy a 1TB USB drive and a Airport Extreme. So that’s all good and he brings over his computer parts and I order up my stuff.
Well, Monday night Jane brings home our new Airport Extreme and I start setting everything up. I format my USB drives that I received a few days before and started copying over all my data.
Things didn’t go so well. Over the network it was going very slow, but I was OK with that. The next day I find that the copy was still going. All day the copy was going. The next day I gave up on that. So I pulled the NAS out of the rack and brought it into the office. I plug the USB into the NAS and try to mount the drive.
Nope, the NAS software can’t read Apple partitions. So I boot Ubuntu on the drive. After a few hours of hacking around and figuring out how to mount the HFS drive and another bit of time figuring out how to mount the FreeBSD UFS2 drives I get the thing copying. Then it stops. Restart…. crash… The thing just kept losing the connection on the USB.
The next day I finally get everything copied over and notice that the fan isn’t working in the USB drive. The USB drive was getting very hot. The fan in the back was not working. I’m thinking to myself, “it’s probably something simple like it’s not plugged in.” I could just open it up and fix it myself, but there is a do-not-open sticker on it. Lame.
I shoot a email off to the support asking about fixing the drive. The next day, I still haven’t heard anything back. So, I open it. The fsck’n power wires for the drives are pushed into the fan blades. Lame. So I fix it up and notice some jumpers. I get the user manual for the drive and found out it for setting striping or spanning modes. It’s set for spanning. I figure that striping would be faster access to the drive. So off I go changing things. I set it for striping and
finally get it repartitioned.
So I built up Dave’s system because it has the USB 2.0 ports on it and my old NAS didn’t. I pull the drives from my NAS and put them into the new system and plug in my USB drive. The copy went much faster this time… except it’s still dropping the USB connection. Peeved I continue restarting and copying.
Finally I get the dam thing done, Thursday night. I connect it to the Airport and everything seems fine. I kick on my Time Machine backup and let it go for the night.
The next day, Time Machine was locked up. ARG! It also locked up my Finder and my Airport. Reboot everything, and it’s working again. Start Time Machine… a few hours go by and it locks up again.
All day I messed with this dam thing trying to get it to work. I reformatted it 50 times. I did everything I could think of and still it’s locking up left and right.
Finally I copy everything back onto the Linux system. The copy went perfect. I setup an RMA to send it back, but I start reading the return policy for EagleTech. It says that if they don’t find anything wrong with it they will charge me $45. Well, I know exactly what’s going to happen. They are going to fool with it for 10 minutes and say everything is fine.
Well, I have set it back to spanning and formatted it using Linux. Now I have it blank and bare connected to my Mac doing my Time Machine backup over USB. It’s going very fast and so far so good.
I’m going to finish the backup then plug it into Dave’s Linux box and copy all my files back onto it. If it locks up one more time I’m done with it.
I think I’ll try to order a new controller card for it and replace it myself. That way I won’t have to mess with EagleTech support.
Oh, and they tested the drive before they shipped it. The checked off everything, but they didn’t check the cooling fan. Lamers.
I should just build my own stuff for now on.
“I should just build my own stuff for now on.”
I thought I would quote you so you don’t forget. Speaking of should have done it myself. My transmission is still in the shop. GRRR
Yeah, I tore the drives out of the USB box and put them in my FreeNAS server. All set now. I’m picking up a $30 Gigabit Ethernet card and that should get me some speed on the file transfers. So far it’s working perfect.