raiding it up, baby!
My mythbox / server has been acting more sluggish than usual yesterday, and so this week I finally took it apart a little bit to see what the problem was. I haven’t really touched this thing for a long time, so I had completely forgotten what it was made of. Well much to my surprise, it was running the harddrive on an IDE ATA harddive (I’ve migrated everything to SATA .. or so I thought). So, I figured that was a good a place as any to start fixing things up.
PC Club is running a great sale on these Western Digital SATA drives — 250g SATA II harddives with 16mb buffers for only $105! I got two of them so I could setup a RAID-1 mirror on my harddrives. Installation was pretty simple, just had to run mdadm to create the setup, then formatted it, and started copying everything over. I gotta say, these things are fast. I’ve already noticed a good speed improvement, so I’m pretty happy. Plus my data is at least partially more secure. I’m so lazy when it comes to backups.
The great thing about this is I did a fresh install on the new disks (since I figured that would help out too), and I got everything up and running pretty quickly (yay amd64!), but I could not get my TV tuner’s firmware to load at all, no matter what I tried. Finally, I realized I could have just copied my old installation over to the new harddrives, instead of rebuilding from scratch. I have no idea why I didn’t think of that earlier. So I scratched the new install, copied it over, and of course it worked great the first time. Gotta love Gentoo — it’s such a timesaver. 