Over the last several months, I’ve been enjoying a pretty decked out home theater system, complete with a terrabyte server which has a RAID-5 drive array. I went with RAID-5 with the intent that I could easily rebuild the drive array if it ever fails.

Well, it happened. Earlier this week, after only 6 months, I heard the alarm beeping in the closet indicating that a drive failed. I carefully shut down the box, pulled the bad drive out and restarted the box (making sure the raid was "off"). Western Digital  hot-shipped me a new drive (the drive is still under warranty so it didn’t cost anything), and showed up yesterday.

This morning, I plopped the drive in and began to rebuild the array: I rebooted the box and the RocketRaid controller detected the drive, and asked me if I wanted to rebuild the array. After about 15 minutes, I got an error saying that it couldn’t rebuild (no explanation) and wanted to reboot, so I did. Once again, the controller asked me if I wanted to rebuild so I reluctantly said ‘yes’.

That was at 10am this morning. It’s now 1:24pm and the machine reports that it’s only at 11%. Hopefully, it’s working but I’m shocked at how slow this is.

While I only had around 300GB of movies on there, I’m pretty annoyed at this for a multitude of reasons:

1. I invested a lot of money on a RAID array, specifically with the intention that it would save my ass in case of a drive failure. Apparently, it didn’t. I consider myself a pretty savvy computer user, I can’t imagine the average home user being able to solve the ‘home backup’ problem.
2. While I only lost a bunch of movies (of which I have the original DVD’s), I also spent A LOT of time transcoding them over to the server.
3. Can you imagine how I would have felt if I lost something that I couldn’t replace - like digital memories? We (the industry) keep pushing technologies such as photos, home digital movies, etc. - If I had lost the videos of my son’s first steps or the first time he said "dad", it would have been horrible.

Anyways, I’m curious to see how this all works out. I’ve been feeling pretty ‘bleh’ about technology in general lately, and this doesn’t really help matters.