The Digital Battlefield

I've not been posting much lately, and it's due to the digital battlefield. I've lost a few of the battles, but am determined to win the war. That war? Hard drive failure.

If you know me, you'll know that I'm a security geek. I have a ReadyNAS Pro Business at home for my storage. It holds up to 6 hard drives in an X-RAID2 array. This prevents data loss when a hard drive fails.

Well Disk #3 decided to die on me late Saturday night. In fact, it was right as Best Buy was closing, so I had to wait till Sunday. I go in first thing and buy a new Seagate drive that's on their compatibility list, and put it in Bay #3. It quick checks the drive, all is good, starts re-syncing the array.

Then a few hours later I come back and the display says Disk #3 has failed. I pop it in my desktop, load SeaTools to check the drive, and sure enough it had failed. Great!

I'll probably return the drive to Best Buy, and am debating if I want to get a full refund or try another drive. Saturday night I ordered a Western Digital Enterprise drive off Newegg, it'll be here tomorrow.

So back to the original Disk #3 that failed. I went to Seagate and filled out the warranty form, went through the process and got to checkout. It was either free, or for 2 day service $19. I chose the 2 day service. Only they didn't agree with my credit card information. I tried again, and still no likey. Well it turns out that they did in fact charge me twice, but their system didn't recognize it.

When I was at Best Buy I also purchased a new headset. The one I have now broke, it's the problem with headphones that have wires - the wire easily gets tangled. So I purchased a Logitech set that is wireless. I get hope, pop it in, and it's not working.

I searched their forums and found a post where a user said it wouldn't work with Windows 7. The Logitech support replied "It's not the headset! What is the poor manufacturer supposed to do when people leapt to a conclusion that has no evidence to support it?"

Well after seeing that and other similar posts where the official support is anything but helpful remarks, I'm not too happy with Logitech. So it makes it easy for me, I won't be buying their Google TV product. Instead I'll buy a TV that supports it internally. If they can't support a headset, it might be too complicated to support Google TV.

So there you go, some of the fun I had on my weekend. I can say in all this I'm really happy with my ReadyNAS. The support forum for that is insane. People are making cool addons for it and official support is overly helpful. So that part is great, and the fact that my data is fine even though a drive failed is great, so one part won..

Update: for those of you who care, Best Buy took back both items no problem. I also found the Plantronics wireless set in stock (guess they stock up Sunday nights?) which worked without a hitch. I had a wired Plantronics before and both work great!