Josh the Aspie’s Blog

Well, the RAID on my hard drives degraded again. I rebuilt it, but while I was doing so it was rather hard to use my computer, and there was no bumping going on this time. The drives are huge, but for some reason they don’t want to keep a RAID running well.

I got the drives, my case, my processor, and some accessories (like a built in 3.5″ bay card reader) from Schrock Innovations, a computer repair and web design company. They had a really great sale called their holiday special, where I got the computer at 5% over cost (to cover parts shipping). I simply customized my computer by asking them to take out the motherboard, remove the keyboard/mouse set, and remove the monitor.

I returned the motherboard afterwards because I misunderstood how many expansion slots would be on the board, and ordered a new one from newegg. It’s the ASUS Crosshair.

Now Schrock Innovations normally has a 15% return fee (which isn’t bad compared to the 20% at DIT or Dell, as much as I was upset about a return fee at the time), but Thor let me return the motherboard without the fee in that particular case because he wanted me to be happy with my computer, and the fact that eventually someone would blow out a motherboard on one of the holiday specials, and need a new one. Lightning strikes, surges happen, and as the title says, Bleep Happens.

So I got the parts back, and installed my new Motherboard and graphics card (the old one had an integrated card), and I got the system running. I told you before about the previous RAID 5 failure. Well now it’s happened again. Apparently a lot of the computers from the Computer Special have been having trouble with their RAID 5 setups degrading, and Thor has confirmed that it’s a problem with the DRIVES so I’m going to be bringing my drives in Tomorrow so that they can replace them as soon as I get the data from the RAID backed up. Luckily the problem cropped up early, so I don’t have a lot of data to back up.

While there have been a few problems with my system, out of all of the places I got the parts to build it, I’m fairly sure that Schrock Innovations has some of the best post-sale care.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Technology, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.