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A hard drive has two states: dead and dying

A hard drive has two states: dead and dying—My oldest hard drive is giving its last death rattle in the form of ever more common clicks. It is still working… but I’m pretty sure it’s days are numbered. I’ve backed up all the data from the clicker drive and now started an experiment. I’ve placed this drive and another semi-clicker into a ReFS mirrored storage space on my Windows 8 desktop. Write performance immediately tanked from 140MBps to 45MBps similar to what people have complained about before but otherwise I haven’t noticed any major problems. Will my data survive? I’m planning on adding another working drive to the array just to hedge my bets…

I bought a domain for my Synology NAS

I took the plunge and bought a domain from Namecheap for my Synology NAS. As an added perk I’ve even created a subdomain for my Tumblr blog :-) I’ll document the steps here in case anyone else has a similar setup and wants to do the same: Purchase a domain from your favorite domain registrar Optional: Create and install a free SSL certificate using StartSSL for your Synology NAS by following this guide Setup a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service. You can either:Preferably: Utilize the Synology MyDS DDNS domain (i.e. XXXX.synology.me).Alternatively: Install Dynamic DNS and be sure to install IPKG and get SSL to workAdd a CNAME for your domain that points to your Dynamic DNS address.Done… or are you? Nope, look at this post to figure out how to secure your Synology device now! All in all, it was very straight forward and a fun weekend project!
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