Hmm. Not Seagate's fault.

The new disk, in an external USB/eSATA enclosure, wouldn't stay up more than a couple of minutes at a time. And it wasn't spinning, down, either: just locking up. OK, that's not a hardware problem; it's probably the kernel not dealing properly with something in SATA II. Installed 2.6.22 from backports, and it seems to have worked. USB was horribly slow, and it doesn't seem to handle hotplugging an eSATA drive, but after a reboot it seems perfectly happy. The same kernel in the fileserver has been up ever since I installed it, and my Ubuntu-based recording studio hasn't had any problems.

So I'll have a couple of 400GB SATA drives free pretty soon. Three once I upgrade the mirror drive, but I want to wait for the price to come down a little. RAID box?

1/14 I may have spoken too soon -- there may also be some kind of controller issue. Or something. I'm dropping back to IDE on the fileserver.

Time for some upgrades?

Upgrading the workstations, and possibly the fileserver, to Lenny (Debian Testing) is starting to look attractive. It's running 2.6.22, which is the one I need to support my Seagate SATA-II drives, and it has Audacity 1.3.4, which is the latest and matches the version in UbuntuStudio.

It's usually safe to upgrade the fileserver, since it's inside the firewall. The only reason to hold off is that every once in a while you get a major upheaval and something breaks, usually in one of my local scripts; when that happens it's handy to have the previous version around somewhere. I'll probably wait a couple of months. There's no reason not to upgrade the workstations now.

I'll keep UbuntuStudio around, too, especially since 64Studio is still based on Etch, so the kernels aren't up to date.