Chieftec Purple Dragon died

After many years of faithful service my huge, heavy, mega-tower Chieftec Purple Dragon case has gone. It blew up in spectacular fashion when the old PSU expired with a loud bang. As I sit quite near it, I had massive fright. Luckily, further examination and testing revealed that the MSi motherboard, overclocked AMD Phenom II X3 720, memory and hard drives had survived.

As I thought that it would be difficult to replace the PSU with the extra long leads to reach to the bottom of the case and I could hardly lift it any more, it was better being rehoused and scrap the power-hungry nVidia 9600GSO graphics, the IDE RAID hard disk drive array and multiple optical drives. So the remains were re-housed in a modern, light case with a fast, SATA hard drive and a new nVidia GT610 graphics card. Amazingly Windows Vista re-activated and we are back on the road again.

The empty Purple Dragon case was thrown in the iron and steel skip at the local dump. It served me well for many years.

Neat NAS

Those of you that have follow my blog know that I'm a big supporter of Windows Home Server. Unfortunately this brilliant software is doomed and the Windows Server 2003 which is the basis for WHS version 1 is now out of support. I still run WHS v1 on a full tower DELL server as the centre of my home network. However I only turn it on when needed as it is too expensive with three hard disk drives, a dual core CPU and lots of fans to run 24/7. The shared folders are safely split across the three drives and when one failed it was easy to replace and recover without any important data loss.


So I was looking for a small, energy efficient NAS to run all the time and provide:
- my music library for the Sonos wireless music system
- recent photos to show on my Nexus tablet
- backup storage for client's computers before I start working on them
- shared marketing documents that can be accessed remotely.

Data protection, resilience and performance were lower priorities than availability. So a single disk NAS seemed to fit the requirements. The WD MyCloud 2Tb for £110 seemed a good price being not that much more expensive than a USB external hard drive. Interestingly, the dual bay/drive version was over twice the price.

Setup wasn't easy as to start with the NAS not discoverable on my LAN. A firmware upgrade and some extra help from the excellent WD support line fixed any problems. The NAS is now mapped as an extra drive on all my systems. Remote access is not easy as it relies on Java which I've removed from all systems, and also recommend that my clients do this too. Another problem was that Windows 7 Home will not allow backup to a network drive. The Professional and Ultimate versions do however. Microsoft shoots itself in the foot yet again as home users will not buy backup software.

This certainly is a neat bit of kit providing almost exactly what I wanted. I haven't tried the 'snapshot' backup service yet as this is isn't a priority.