AMPLE BLAZE CAST 004: PLEX DOWN & LAPPY UPGRADE

Well if you’re a user of our Plex server you would have seen just before we went down we had sent out a notice that our Plex server will be down until further notice well this was kinda true. I feel a lot of our users thought it was going down permanently. This is incorrect we had to stop our Plex server temporarily because we had to do a quick upgrade to our Plex server and also our Ample Blaze production machine. Our machine was down for a few hours last night and well I thought we were going to be down for at least half a day today as well but as I could not sleep and as my Mard IT colleague would say my OCD kicked in so I had to make sure the machine was back up and running without missing a beat.

In this post, I thought on top of having this in a podcast video form I would write it for our readers out there. The whole process was smoother than I expected I did not have any issues that were very hard to get over.

The story starts with the original HP Omen computer I had was a computer that was an I7 machine which is awesome it flew with no issues and it had 16gbits of RAM and which is more than enough but this computer I bought I would say four years ago and although I have not felt any effect of the laptop running slower in this four year period. The trigger that caused me to upgrade this computer or even to think about updating the computer as a whole was the fact that the only issue that I found with this machine was the storage configuration.

The original storage configuration was when I bought this machine from JBHI-FI and it cost just a few dollars over $2K this configuration came with two hard drives one SSD and one SATA drive. firstly the SSD was only 128G and you won’t believe that I managed to make it work and continue to make it work until last night and the upgrade. Well, I thought it was a better idea to resolve the issue and prevent the issues from occurring before it’s too late.

I went from the 128G SSD to a 1TB SSD drive from Crucial. This was the best option for my budget and what I really wanted to achieve for the next five years.

On top of this, I wanted to give my laptop the maximum upgrade to how much RAM the laptop can have and it was not like I felt 16G was not enough, I went from 16GB to 32GB a 2 x16GB SP Sticks.

This was the new hardware that I went with and I had the support of MARD IT we had Mard IT come out and give us the hardware upgrade and there is no other IT service I would recommend any higher besides myself. You can find them here and they can support all your hardware needs and more.

The second half of this upgrade which was actually done before all the hardware installs was while we waited for all the RAM memory and the new SSD to arrive, Ample Blaze came into play here where we attained a new external hard drive and managed to clone our existing original 128 LiteOn SSD drive to an external 2TB portable USB hard drive and this could be found online and as I did in-store at JB HiFi brought to you by Seagate.

Now I had to think of an easy way and what would be the quickest way to get all my primary 128SSD operating system and programs across to my new SSD 1TB drive mentioned above and well the easiest and quickest way was to purchase a software application brought to you by a software company called EaseUS.

EaseUS has a program called EaseUS Partition Master and I bought it with a discount for under $AUD40. I have to say this was one of the best software application investments I made in a long time, the last time I made an investment like this was when I bought the SmallPDF subscription. I paid less than $40AUD for lifetime updates.

With all this, we just had the evening as downtime for my computer to be down and our Ample Blaze Plex server to be down after this we were up and running and restoring the hard drive operating system from the external 2TB portable hard drive took over an hour to get it onto the new 1TB SSD from Crucial but after this, we were pretty much up and running from where we left off after I shut down the computer and unplugged my external hard drive we booted from and after I unplugged it I turned it back on.

Once I turned it back on it booted into the new 1TB SSD straight away and we had no delays I was in as quick or even quicker than the original SSD.

We had a few little elements that we had to update as the clone of the drive was done before I had updated the affected software applications and this was our Ample Blaze Plex Server we had to pull the new update and make sure the remote access was working after this then all that was left was making sure that all windows updates were up to date and complete.

Once all this was done then I could call it a night and get some shut eye. If you need any of our services we are always here to help you.

Feel free to contact us at info@ampleblaze.com and don’t forget about MardIT