Consumed Consumer . org

Not long ago I dropped my old trusty tablet hybrid on the floor and the monitor went blank. I had to quickly purchase a new laptop, which itself was fixed only days ago. I will discuss here how I got a new one and what others can do when their laptop is almost dead to retrieve their data.

I have a laptop that allows me to swap my DVD drive (which I don't use much) for a second hard drive in RAID. I'm looking at buying a drive in the $100-200 range to complement my existing SATA drive.

As I was running out of space on my DNS-323, I decided to upgrade my two 1 TB drives to 2 TB. Due to insufficient research into the matter, I was surprised to read, prior to performing the upgrade, that there are significant performance issues with these drives.

For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of running a TOR relay for my own privacy reasons and to give back to the community as well. Though my router and NAS (and possibly even my WD Live box) have enough chutzpah to run it, I prefer to use a very old computer instead for reasons of separation (security). For a while, I even considered buying a Raspberry Pi or some other similar cheap gizmo, then I remember I have a bunch of old computers I've never used..

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

After a few attempts which ended in failure, I managed to format my 2 x 2TB 4k Western Digital drives . Now that it’s done, it seems incredibly simple. It is also “sticky”, meaning it does not need to be performed on each reboot (DUH!).