Happening In Threes

It is a relatively well known fact that things always seem to happen in threes. Just one of those universal oddities, and when it’s welcome (like three random cheques appearing in the post) that’s all well and good. But when it’s something not so pleasant, it does tend to irk somewhat.

Following on from my previous post about using Windows Home Server in a small business, I have been eyeing the HP MediaSmart EX490 WHS box but stock has been rarer than hens teeth.
Last Thursday the hard drive in my primary work notebook (a Dell XPS M1530) started to give up the ghost after a couple of years of severely heavy use. I ordered a new drive (7,200 spin instead of 5,400), replaced it and restored from the Windows Home Server. Chalk up another win to the “set and forget” nature of the product.

Then on Wednesday evening my WHS box finally keeled over and died. I’m not surprised, what started as a test box ended up getting a large amount of use over the last year or so and it was built up of old hardware as a test to see how it handled it. It was also the last PC I built myself, in recent years with the drop in prices of machines from the primary builders I haven’t even contemplated buying all the components and building up a machine myself.

Several hard drives, motherboards and power supplies later the machine flat out refused to switch on and that was that the end of it for me. I removed the drives, memory and anything else I could salvage and put the sad case aside.
The following morning I came into the office, thinking about the HP box even more, but not really wanting to spend out £430. Amazon even had the servers in stock for next day shipping…

Then I noticed a PC I had up on the workbench. An old unit that I was rebuilding to install in the staff room of my primary client. The machine had died overnight, and I had left it pulling down items from Windows Update. I restarted the machine. Nothing, completely dead. Wandered into the staff room to check the machine I put in the afternoon before. Guess what? Yes, dead. Three hardware failures in less than 24 hours!

The happy end to the story is that I managed to salvage memory and hard drives from the PCs (and have already used them today).
I also saved myself from buying the HP server. Last night I took two of the three drives that came from the deceased WHS box and installed them into a Dell chassis. Half an hour of new drivers, product reactivation and integrity checking later my WHS lived again.

Again this proves what a hardy solution WHS is, and I will be writing more posts centred around it in the very near future.