Contrary to what some people would have everyone believe, Microsoft don’t screw up very often. However, when they do screw up, they seem to screw up with style.
This Christmas I was off work from 18th Dec to 28th Dec inclusive – quite a long time and also a bargain, at only 5 days of annual leave for a total of 11 days off work. It was nice to be away from a computer screen, only returning to check email and play a few games. Anyway, I digress.
As soon as RAID controllers started being built into affordable motherboards, I decided using RAID for my home PC was a good idea. For the last 6-7 years, I have used RAID on every PC I have built.
There are several RAID configurations. RAID 0 (striping) utilises two or more identical hard drives, and splits each file equally across them, yielding much faster disk performance (limited by the throughput of the disk I/O controller) as the disks read and write at the same time. The total available storage is the sum of the individual drives’ capacity. RAID 1 (mirrored) could be considered the opposite of striping, in that each file is written to all disks. This effectively provides realtime backup since the content of all drives in the array is identical, with no performance cost.
I’ve only ever used RAID 0. For a home PC, RAID 1 doesn’t offer any real benefits that cannot be achieved with a half-decent backup policy, but effectively doubles the cost of disk space if you use two disks.
A few weeks ago I started seeing software failures on the Linux server. Although they were infrequent they were frustrating, to say the least, and would sometimes require me to find a workaround through configuration.
They say that bad luck comes in threes.
I don’t know who They are, but why did They have to say it? Why not twos? Or “bad luck comes accompanied by no other instances of bad luck whatsoever”?
Anyway, following the tragic and catastrophic failure of my UPS, and the terminal affliction suffered by my wing mirror (oh yes, terrible times indeed), my computer has now decided things were still going too well for its liking, and a further helping of drama was required in order to provide some kind of counterpoint to the general wellness from which I was suffering.
About a week ago, I noticed that the display on the UPS protecting the computers in the office indicated it was charging. Strange, I thought, seeing as I hadn’t noticed a power cut. The UPS emits a rather loud second-long beep every four seconds during any power loss, and I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it – even if it happened while I was asleep.
Bad Behavior has blocked 250 access attempts in the last 7 days.