Data danger

My RAID 5 array is reporting a failed drive. I think it's just being nervous. I've taken it out of the MD and am running tests on it. It'll probably take a day to finish (1.5T drive). I really don't want to buy any more drives.

*update - probably more like 6 days to test the drive. This seems kind of silly. I have stopped it and restarted it in Screen. Hope I don't lose any more drives in the next week.

Roku, Netflix, etc

I cancelled my Netflix sub today, before the 30 day free trial was up. Their movie selection is just hopeless. I guess they might be better on TV shows, but I have no interest.

I'm playing around with some of the other channels - there's a TON of free junk you can get via Roku. The Smithsonian channel has a lot of good stuff on it. There are many channels for lovers of cheesy stuff - Kung Fu Theater looks good and cheesy. There are several free public domain channels. Crackle has some more modern/major movies for free.

As far as major pictures, I may use Vudu - for $3.99 for a rental it's easier than stopping by Redbox on the way home.

I did install a Plex server on my laptop and I played with that this evening. It's pretty good. I'd prefer to be running it on the Linux box that hosts the RAID array, but they don't have an official SUSE version and the unofficial one doesn't install correctly. I will think about moving to Windows, but that would involve coming up with another solution for the RAID 5 array, which I currently do in Linux MD. Under Windows I'd probably have to use a hardware card and that could get expensive given that I'm currently using a 5 drive array.