Without going into too much detail, my first-ever (yes, Entercom’s a bit behind the times in some ways) official Employee Review went fairly well. That’s one less thing to worry about in my permanent record, I suppose. It has been noted that I need to work on my organizational and communications skills and sometimes my attitude leaves a bit to be desired. All in all, though, it was a positive review. Yay!

The really big news of the day is that our problems with The Beast are all over. You see, it finally dawned on me that I should contact 3Ware about their RAID controller. After a couple of email exchanges, this is what I was told:

“If you have a 5xxx series controller, pressing F9 instead of ENTER will accept dissimilar drives into an array.”

Aaaaaargh! It was that easy all along? How about a hint on the screen that ENTER isn’t the only keypress available? How about something in the printed docs? Huh?

I don’t care too much about documentational and user-interface stupidity right now, though, because The Beast finally has a working 500 gigabyte array onto which Enco files are being copied as I type this. Hot diggity damn. That’s one major problem off my back. Two, if you count the Employee Review…

You may recall the problem we had this past weekend with our Enco servers. While we did get the main server back online with a surprising minimum of fuss, our standby server is still awaiting the correct replacement drive. The main cause of our problem is 3Ware’s insistence on having only 100% identical hard drives in any given array, a requirement quite out of step with most sensible RAID controller manufacturers.

Fine then. Since we don’t want to completely rebuild The Beast as a SCSI-based machine (bloody expensive proposition, that) we figured we’d hunt down another drive of the exact same model number as the others already in the machine. This way we can get a bit more mileage out of our lamebrained investment in 3Ware’s IDE-RAID technology. Great idea, right?

Wrong!

Same model number, different month, slightly different capacity.

It was no surprise that when I tested the new drive anyway (Gary would have insisted on it) I see this:

Delightful. Just delightful. It looks like we’re going to have to spend just shy of $1000 on hard drives to replace the entire bloody damned set. And that means at least two more days before our standby server is once again on standby.

I hate working without a ‘net…