Drobo's Coming!

Those of you who know me well enough, know that I have a little problem letting go of data. I'm not assumed to admit that I am an electronic hoarder. I collect all sorts of electronic information; movies, books (audio/pdf/epub), TV shows, and music. I've been collecting and ripping everything I can get my grubby little paws on. It really is "what I do".

I personally feel that this sort of "collecting" is not a bad thing - of course I do. I can sleep well at night knowing that I'm not a real life hoarder and I don't live in a house full of stuff I can trip over or have herds of cats climbing around an obstacle course in my dining room.

This type of collecting can be challenging sometimes. In the past I had piles of floppy disks. In time I was able to transfer them onto CD's. The CD's turned into DVD's, not too long ago. As my collection grew, so did my media collection.

This system has worked well, it's taken many hours of my life coping data and battling the dreaded CRC error, which is what seems to happen to all optical disks eventually.

Recently the cost of very large hard drives has dropped to dramatically, to the point that I can purchase a 2 TB SATA hard drive for less than $100, including tax! This price drop has finally made it possible for me to move all my data to a live drive. To make it accessible at any time. No more digging through disk binders to look for season two of ALF! I can now just open the folder called TV and find the ALF folder, and click on the season two folder.

So I purchased my first 2 TB hard drive, then a second, and a third. These this are HUGE, and I moved all my data over. At first it was a no brainer. plug these drive into my PC and do a quick NTFS format. But, as you know, I'm an Apple guy, and Mac's do not like NTFS. They could read the files, but I couldn't copy or edit anything. So I started using an external enclosure to run these drives from USB. This solved a convenience problem, and I changed my format to FAT32. Which means no single file can be larger than 2 GB. But I can work with that.

It was at this point when I started looking for dual and quad drive enclosures, so I could plug several drives into one unit and not have hard drives tethered all oner my desk. It was starting to get messy.

I was also starting to worry about my data. Hard drives fail. They all do. In a way they're just like people. At some point every hard drive dies, and you can't tell when. As a sorta-of back up, and to keep my office from being too cluttered, I had given all my DVD's to my father. This not only kept him entertained, but served as an off site backup. I started to think about RAID or at least having multiply copies of drives. It was getting really messy now...

It was while I was scouring the Internet for something to help me figure out how to do this that I remembered Drobo!

For those not in the know, Drobo is an amazing device. It acts as a multi drive enclosure, and provides it's own flavour of RAID. You can, while still accessing your files, yank out a drive and pop in a new one, and this little black box will just make everything work. It's the world's easiest RAID.

As luck would have it, I am able to order the four-bay Drobo from work! So, as I write this, there is a Drobo out there making its way to my waiting hands. And I have there 2 TB hard drives here waiting to park themselves in their new Drobo home. Once I finally get it, I'll post a video documenting the process or setting up my new Drobo.

Stay tuned...

eSATA, USB 3.0, and eBay

Well, it has been an interesting few weeks for me. Although it has been around for years now, I have just discovered how great eBay really is! I've order a few trinkets and bobbles from eBay over the years, but I tended to focus only of a few select items that I could not easily find locally.

You probably don't know this about me yet, but I am a very impulsive person. I don't like to wait for anything. I will usually take a hit, even financially, if it means I don't have to wait for something. This is why eBay has never appealed to me before now. But I finally get it! If I order enough stuff, for long enough, I start to receive my earlier purchases, as I am still ordering new items. So I can get that oh-so-heavenly feeling of instant gratification, while I wait. It's great!

So, what have I been ordering? Glad you asked. I've been tweaking out my Windows 7 PC with every port possible. This PC was a great buy when I got it several months ago. For $20 I got a 3GHz Pentium 4, with 2 gigs of RAM, a DVD r/w drive, and a 120 GB hard drive. It even came freshly formatted with Windows XP Pro. I bought two of these machines, as there were probably 80 of them for sale at that price. I am a Mac guy, but I work with Windows all day long, and that is where my training is, so It's good to have at least one PC around that I can play with.

Since I picked up this machine, I've been "optimizing" it. I first installed Windows 7 Home Premium, and two more gigs of RAM. I also popped in two 2 TB hard drives for storage. I then started looking around eBay to see about adding a SATA PCI card. I thought that I may want to add a few more 2 TB drives to this system, and build one heck of a home storage computer.

Well, before I knew it, I had ordered eSATA cables and adapters, a USB 3.0 PCIe card, and other varies parts, all to be added to this lowly little PC.

Today, I got my USB 3.0 external 2.5" hard drive enclosure, and was able to finally test out what kind of speed I could get out of it. I am amazed at just how fast the data transfer is from this drive. I'm getting about 55-70 MB/second! I can transfer a 700MB video file in about 9 or 10 seconds. That's just crazy!!! Needless to say, I am impressed.

So what do I have in-store for this cheap PC? Firewire, eSATA, more hard drives? I'll have to see. I suppose it all depends on what I can find on eBay and how much I can cram into this thing. :)

Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my site. To be completely upfront, this is not my first attempt at starting up a blog. I have tried a few other sites in the past and I can say with all honesty that I just plan lost interest. I do, however, still feel a strong desire to share my experiences with the Internet. So I am trying this again.

Let me first start out by telling you a little about myself. I am not a professional writer by any stretch of the word - as will be evident by my work here. I am just a man, closing in on middle age, with a little disposable income, and a passion for technology. What you will find here is a collection of projects, and discoveries that I make as I move forward in this adventure that is modern technology. I will focus almost exclusively on computers and related technologies, but you will also see some of my other foray's into technology here as well.

For example, I've built a few arcade machines in my time, and I'm not talking about loading up a MAME emulator, I'm talking about completely scratch building an authentic cabinet and setting up a front end. I'll share that project with you here. I am also restoring an old (circa 1930's) radio cabinet, and plan to put a computer in it, turning it into a modern jukebox. Another passion I have is collecting vintage computers and will share my collection here.

I hope to share my adventures with you all. Maybe I can inspire you, maybe you can help inspire me too.

So follow along as I make this journey into the "blog-o-sphere".