Everything is on track for the hang to commence a week tomorrow. Looking back, it amazes me that the negotiations and toing and froing to get in the position of having a show open have taken up nearly 12 months of my time. The last 6 weeks have been a stroll in many respects given that I set deadlines early for post production finishing such as framing, packing and exhibition artefacts such as catalogues and information panels.
My mind began to turn to non-exhibition tasks that have fallen by the wayside such as what to replace my now out of support WHS server with and TTG upgrades to my website. Then up popped Apple with a potential hard drive issue on my iMAC. It was literally 48 hours past Microsoft’s cessation of support for WHS Server 2003 that my server started to make horrible noises and drop discs from the RAID. Internal temperatures had reached 57 degrees Celsius. I had already been researching replacements and Microsoft had priced itself out of the market. Why? I believe that WHS was too good a deal and it was the old and maybe new adage of trying to screw people for continuous revenue, much like Adobe are trying to do with CC.
I settled on a WD DL4100 NAS with their RED drives specifically made for NAS usage. I was surprised at how quickly the order was despatched and I was given my time slot for delivery on Friday morning. It came and went. I chased up the tracking. Already delivered! I chased DPD – not an easy task. It turns out they had delivered it to Debenhams. Great. Eventually a harassed driver delivered it to me in the afternoon having been confined to the house waiting for the arrival. Setup was not too bad. Very quiet and very quick transfer of data from the WHS box to this. It was 20 degrees cooler than the WHS box also. So on Saturday I decided to try out a full backup from the Windows side of the iMAC and that worked a treat until I saw a red LED and I got an email ( very efficient) from the box telling me that drive 4 had failed. Less than 24 hours running and a drive specifically designed for this type of use fails!
I know these things happen and drives fail early or run for years.
The heat rose somewhat as I tried to register a service request. The box automatically registered my device on build and I got an email from WD confirming warranty etc. but could I raise an RMA against this registered product? No. Obviously left and right hand in the organisation and neither did all the pages work on their site. Eventually I got some form of service request off but all in all not a good experience.
Given the heat, the only answer was to crack open a bottle of Rose and wash down a Salad Nicoise in the back yard and ponder at my dependency on zeroes and ones compared to my files of carefully stored negatives…….