After a couple of delays, my replacement Edge10 DAS 501t has arrived. Why a replacement? The first one refused to power on.

This morning, I took delivery of an Edge10 DAS 501t storage box. It's an external eSATA box with room for 5 drives, running with a port multiplier. Thus, it only needs a single eSATA connector to join all 5 drives to the host machine.

Vlad is now alive again.

After spending a significant chunk of Saturday grubbing around on the floor, elbow-deep in computers (think James Herriot, only less gooey and with sharper edges), I've diagnosed vlad's problems: At least one of the two hard drives in the RAID-1 array containing my home directory has media errors, and the motherboard has decided to stop working entirely.

At about half eleven last night, my server, vlad, died. Quite comprehensively.