Admittedly I have been seeing some strange behavior from our home server lately – for example, I’ll try to access a drive from my desktop and get an “Unable to Connect” error, then come to find that the box rebooted and is sitting at the Windows login prompt. Login to restore file sharing and within a couple of hours, it would do the same thing again.
I haven’t had much time to research this yet, but I’m kind of hoping that this is one of the older drives in the system. It contains something like 4 drives total – 1 relatively small drive just for the OS, an older 80GB drive, and then two 400GB drives that are on their own controller. Honestly, it’s been time to address this for a while – noise has been getting pretty bad and we’re going to be losing the spare bedroom that it currently resides in sometime next spring, not to mention storage issues of just needing more space … so maybe this is an opportunity to do a little upgrading in the process.
I already have a “leftover” 1.5TB drive that I tried to use to expand our DVR (didn’t work – box had too much lag and got confused by the disk size). I see I can get another one for like $80, so I’m thinking about maybe picking up a second to use in a mirror, with probably Mozy as a secondary off-site backup. I’m also seriously considering Windows Home Server – right now it’s just running an old XP license that I had, and some of the features (backup, streaming) look kinda cool. It’s one of those upgrades where part of it would be legitimate protection for our important files (10 years of photos, music, all of my creative work), but a good chunk would also be me geeking out … and that’s ok, but I still need to get a better gauge on what we can squeak through in the budget first.
In the meantime, I copied over a few working files that I needed and shut the thing down. Later I might try to disable that drive so that I can at least turn it back on, although again, not being sure what’s even on it, I won’t really know if that would be worthwhile until after actually doing it!