When I first bought my SC-101, I loved it. I had a pair of 200GB
drives, mirrored and partitioned into three 50 GB drives each. This lift
50 GB for future expansion. A couple years on, and after collecting the
photos for our flower shop (The Bloomery in
Butler, PA), I started to realize some of the complaints others have had
with this device. The file system doesn’t cache the file list, so each
time you open a folder, the entire file system has to be read. As you add
more and more files, this time takes longer and longer. After about 15,000
photos, this was taking a very long time.
Eventually, we ran out of room on the photo parition, and it was time to
expand it. Should be simple enough using the management tools provided,
but this is where disaster struck. The expansion failed, and the photo
archive was seemingly lost.
After picking through the help files, I found they include a command-line
tool which can be used to recover files from broken partitions. I ran out
and bought a Western Digital USB hard drive, and ran the recovery tool,
transferring to the USB drive. The recovery tool worked perfectly, and I
was able to recover all the files, but my confidence in the device was
shaken.
The USB drive is a good start, but doesn’t really get me where I need to
go. I’ll detail some of my next steps in following blog
posts.