My 2 Cents

This is an MP3 I just dug up from the collection, the uncle and a friend of his are performing. I recorded this live @ Versailles Poultry Days with a Presonus Firebox and condenser mic of mine. Have a listen.

Note: I recorded and mixed this on a Presonus Firebox live. I was happy with the result.

You’ve seen my previous post about the failed Drobo experience. I’m waiting on an RMA to be processed, but I went ahead and ordered a different NAS, the QNAP 239-Pro. I considered the 439 Pro (4 bay version versus 2-bay 239) but the cost differential wasn’t worth it to me. At least not right now. I can always replace it later.

Cnet gives it pretty good reviews, rates it a “Very Good” with 3.5 Stars.

Check it out on the QNAP website here:

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=118

I will be sure to post a complete product review once I’ve had a chance to take her around the block. I sure hope it works out better than my Drobo experience.

I recently purchased a 2nd generation Drobo from Data Robotics, Inc. along with their NAS head (they call it a DroboShare). At $589.99 for the combo, I felt like I was paying a bit much for a NAS, but with the BeyondRAID features that Data Robotics advertises, I was willing to spend a little more for those features. Well let me tell you, it’s going back.

I installed a pair of 2tb SATA drives into my Drobo, and a 1tb drive I had sitting around, giving me a total of about 2.69tb working space. Plenty of space to hold the content I’ve got floating various places – not a bad start. I was up and running pretty quickly, and started the process of moving my content to the Drobo. I can tell you this, my first impression was “Gee, this is pretty pokey.” I moved a single FLV file to the drobo, and couldn’t even get it to play back without skipping. The same file on my local hard drive runs flawlessly. Now keep in mind, I’m not talking about a 2 gigabyte file here, just a little 30 meg video file. Now before you go saying “well maybe your network has problems” let me assure you – it doesn’t. I’m a network architect by trade, my network is fine.

So I cut the Drobo a little slack and live with the fact that it’s not going to be “fast” storage, so I relegate it to bulk storage – that’s ok, I can live with that. But – it can’t even do that right. One time, the drobo share just lost all ability to mount the drobo, and it was showing up as unformatted (even though the drobo dashboard app could see all the disks). Going on guidance found on the web, I disconnected the drobo from the droboshare and connected it to my mac via Firewire. It mounted fine. So I moved it back to the DroboShare, and it came right up. Werid, can’t explain it.

So all is fine for a couple of days, and then all of a sudden, as I try to begin moving more content to the Drobo, it stops responding. A quick glance at the unit show it’s in standby. Weird. As I watch it more closely, it seems like it keeps rebooting. I didn’t do anything to piss it off, it just seems to be rebooting for no reason. Then all of a sudden, after a few power cycles (while the drobo is properly in standby) it starts going to standby all by itself – over and over. It wont even stay on now. So I once again disconnect it from the DroboShare and connect it to my Mac. Works fine. But then twice, over the course of just letting it spin on the mac for 2 days, the third slot goes dark. Not like a failed disk (that would trigger a red light), but the light just goes out. Like the disk disappeared and the drobo can’t figure out what’s going on. Needless to say, this is inexcusable.

Drobo Support instructs me to connect the drobo to my computer (knowing it’s a mac) and run a disk repair. As I quiz them “Can it do that, since it’s NTFS and NTFS is read only on a mac” they tell me – “You’re right, you need to connnect it to a PC.”. I inform them (but they already know) I’m a Mac user, and don’t have a PC – they tell me “You need to find a PC to connect it to”. Ok so this is stupid, not only have they not given me any real information, they tell me my only option is to connect my Drobo to a computing platform I don’t even own.. Guys, you’re really causing me to lose faith here.

A few more rounds with tech support, and they start asking me about the power connector, which I already commended was flakey. Not loose, not in need of repair, just a crappy design of which is totally unacceptable for a data storage platform. Shoddy engineering. My requests for help to Drobo have gone nearly unanswered, they haven’t offered any real tech support of any kind, performed any diagnostics, or offered any solutions. They’ve completely failed me.

Data Robotics – you can have this thing back. I’m not ready to endorse a product with these sorts of traits and flaws. You’ve had your chance to make it right, you’ve had your chance to convince me that you’ve got a decent product – you’ve totally blown it. I was ready to brag to all of my friends about this “wonderful product, the Drobo – you should really buy one” but now the story is “Stay away, this product sounds cool, but isnt’ ready for primetime and not reliable enough to trust your data to”. Sorry Data Robotics, you had your chance . I want my money back.

Computer Graphics are so cool – this is a neat effect I threw together when messing around in Final Cut Express. Apple did a sweet job on this product, I would highly recommend it to anybody looking to get into entry level digital video editing.  The muzzle flash overlay was found on the internet, as was the audio of the rifle firing.  It looks SOOO real!

A friend of mine sent this to me, Dave W8DEO, said he thought of me when he saw it. I tend to agree.

2 Words – Bad Ass.

Well my new hard drives showed up, some refurbished (white label) WD green 2tb SATA drives. I ripped a dinky 160gb drive (wow, did I just use those words?) out of my Drobo, and slapped in a single 2tb drive. Drobo says 3 hours to rebuild and “protect my data” then I can yank another drive and stick in another 2tb drive. Still deciding whether or not to leave a 1tb drive in there, or stick it in something else. Might leave it there for now. The Drobo is cool in what it does, but it’s a little glitchy (not to the extent that I’ve suffered any data loss – knock on wood) and not the fastest thing in the world. Like anything else, it’s a compromise.

Getting my Flu shot today. Yay!

I just finished etching my first PCB using the photoresist method. Holy crap, that was awesome. I’ll never use the toner transfer method again! Well maybe I will, but seriously – this was the most painless PCB I’ve ever produced. The board is not perfect, but it’s certainly at par with most of the others I’ve done (especially ones done one the first try). Even the thinnest traces turned out rocking awesome.

Getting ready to take the girls out to Trick or Treat.  Nothing like walking the streets of town, trusty Glock by my side of course, watching all of the weirdo’s that creep out of the woodwork in search of free candy   I have a Princess and a Devil with me – I hope they share some of their candy warez with me.

Well I’m in the process of recovering from a server crash – the power supply in the system previously in charge of running this blog died, and I really didn’t want to spend the time bringing everything back – so I’m just going to start from scratch. Not too much stuff in the old blog anyhow, so no sweat.