Storage In The Modern World and A Bit of Luck!

Some of you who've been reading my ramblings for a while might think that I have a storage obsession..... and I might. However, as anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT world will tell you. That's actually the norm. We get paid to be prepared for and to recover from disasters of digital/ Binary proportions! See what I did there.....

Although I haven't worked in that world for over 10 years now, those principles are ingrained into my thinking. So, backing up and storage capacity is always on my mind. Right now, I'm in the process of taking my file server from 3 drives and 6 terabytes of HDD space to 4 drives and 8Tb. Some might consider that excessive, but really not so much when you consider that each of the 2 HTPCs have at least 500Gb as a scratch disk for temp storage and my desktop workstation has 4Tb by itself. .....and that's not counting any of their relatively small SSD boot drives. My rough rule of thumb is always to have at least as much as the combined capacities of all of our home computers' storage space in the file server that functions as backup AND media server.

What I had done in the past when using Microsoft's Windows Home Server was to simply trust in it's built-in redundancy schemes and call it a day. Well.....first of all, I've decided to move away from M$ now that WHS is a dead product and secondly decided to move to a more sophisticated (read secure) backup/redundancy set up. I think I've previously discussed migrating to NAS4Free before, so I'm not going to get into that here other than to say that in order to fully implement ZFS in an efficient manner I needed a 4th, 2Tb drive which will allow me to still have 6Tb of storage while losing only one drive's capacity to parity. I'll do a detailed "build-up/rebuild" post on the retooled Spectre when it's up. So, that's it? That's all I'm going to talk about this morning? A rebuild that hasn't even happeded yet?

Oh NO!!! Not by a long-shot! I'm going to talk about this: the Drobo Mini.

As you can see by this image, it's external storage.... with a twist! So; it has 4 bays, "so what"? Ah....let me start from the beginning and tell you a little story. 

Much like House with Wilson, many of my little ideas come from conversations with someone else. This last summer while my "location video" producing brother-in-law was here with his family, we discussed all things computer but as part of our little project to rip our DVD movies to digital files, he made mention of the fact that he had many external hard drives that he's collected and used them as necessary to store the many gigabytes of video files for his job. And that they are just kind of a necessity of his work-world. My question to him was that; "aren't they too slow" at USB 2.0 speed? His reply was, that it was pretty much the best he could do since Firewire was dead and that Thunderbolt was too difficult to find AND too expensive. Holy Interfaces Batman! That sounds like a challenge!

After consulting the Bat-Computer, I came across the Drobo line of storage. Yes; that which is most beloved of professional photographers and Mac-o-philes the world over.Of course, being of the "great unwashed" (PC users), I knew squat about them, but I did learn that they were pretty much "desktop" devices "Rats! Foiled by the Riddler"! Wait-a-minute; according to the bat-computer (that's Google to you, Bat-brain), there was a portable version that had hit the market in 2012.

Even better, it would allow you to intermix drives of all different capacities and makes, all while keeping a RAID scheme going giving.....TA-DA..... DATA REDUNDANCY!!! Oh; it gets better! There's a bay to take a mSATA SSD to allow caching acceleration, has BOTH USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt pass-through interfaces! All built into a 7" x 7" carbon-fiber reinforced "soft-touch" case with 2 whisper-quiet cooling fans and the smallest power brick-ette you ever saw. What's not to like?!? .......uhhh.....the $649 "List Price" (yikes)!!! Even the $399 Amazon price is pretty stiff, since remember; you have to provide your own drives!

Yeah; this is about what I felt like. For a tech-head like me, it's pretty much like the 16 year old who saw, fell in love with, then went to the Porsche car lot and looked at the price sticker. That price is all well and good for a professional who's writing this off as a business expense and is expecting to make money with it, for an "enthusiast" like me, it amounts to taking a Saturday afternoon and going by the Ferrari and Aston Martin dealers to look at the new models! 

Then, this happened! On occasion, you can still find really good deals on eBay! On Tuesday; St. Patrick's Day, just randomly surfing, I came across not just a Drobo Mini on eBay at a decent price (about $150 at the time), but it was fully populated with 4 Western Digital Blue 320Gb drives AND a Crucial M4 256Gb mSATA SSD! OK, so after I slowed down the heavy breathing, I decided to just keep an eye on it "just in case" it didn't go into an astronomical price-point that I couldn't justify. I got home yesterday afternoon and it was at about $190. At that point, I put my eBay strategy into play; which is deciding what it was worth to me, the max that I was going to be willing to pay for it and setting that as a limit. The amount was $250. Here's my rationale (such as it is for something I don't need to have): 

• At worse, I can sell it for at least that and get my money back since they sell for well over that amount on a regular basis. Know you product!
• The amount was reasonable given it's price at that point and since "that point" was within 45 minutes of the end time (which as an awkward weekday, before the evening so most folks are still at or trying to get home from work). 
• I could completely "walk away" without a blink of an eye since I really didn't "need it", and I can afford it right now since I'm doing a series of computer jobs that would pay for it.
• It was fully populated meaning that I can put it to use immediately without paying one more dime to buy any drives, although I have several sitting around right here. Further more, this would allow me to buy bigger ones (2Tb) over time and replace them and the Drobo is set up for me to replace them "on the fly" and restore the data on the ones that were in use since that's one of it's major selling point/features.
• And for some reason that guy put a 256Gb mSATA SSD in there as the "accelerator" which was completely unnecessary since the firmware sets a 64Gb cache limit! Again; do your research and know your product. Therefore, I at some future date can pick up a 64Gb drive for that purpose, and move the 256Gb one to my ThinkPad X1 with has an empty mSATA socket to up the storage capacity of that machine which I was planning on doing anyway! 
• In the final calculation, I had to figure about $70-90 on the plus side for the mSATA that I'll end up using in my ThinkPad. I could if I was so motivated, sell the 4, 320Gb drives for at least $15 each. That total would be around $130.

In the end, I bid $237, which was below my "cut-off", and won it at $225 (free shipping). If I deduct the other amounts which was the drives in it that I'm going to retask or replace, that will put the "bare" Drobo Mini at less than $100. At the end of the day; if I find that it's not useful or I just want to get my money back out of it, the transaction should turn a profit. Will I do that? Doubtful: I'm certain I'll be able to use it as a semi-portable storage solution that has built-in redundancy and is upgradeable. And in the today's digital world; is there's no such thing as having too much storage!?!

Frugal Propellerhead Goes to Disney World

So; at long last; the Frugal Propellerhead meets the Disney Experience.... Oh, I don't mean the go to Disneyland for the day type of experience. That's more like a really, nicely done Six Flags. Nooooo..... I mean the full blown go to Disney World for a week immersion! It's no secret among my friends that I've never been a Disney kind of a guy. In fact, I'm famously anti-Disney. Just not a big believer in the sugar-coated perfect world structured for the upper-middle-class. Don't believe me? Go there and watch the people (and their behaviors), then compare that to the your last trip to the various Six Flags of the world. See..... But no, this is not a post on the sociological aspects of modern America and Disney's role in it, it's a post about our trip and how technology was part of it, as is the purpose of this Blog.

So how does anyone (much less a Propellerhead) deal with this? 

 

It starts with these two indispensible items. Your Magicband from Disney and your smartphone. Android, IOS doesn't matter. Getting the Disney experience App does. If you are planning on getting the full experience of several days and stay "on property" (more on this later), the Magicband is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah, that's what all it does. It completely eliminates the need to carry a wallet...... plus it tracks everything you do (as well as facilitate it) for Disney. So, it's not for the paranoid amongst you. But frankly, it's a bit of genius and works well. My personal favorite thing about it? It's your room key so you don't have to make sure to give the kids "the card" when they come and go! If you stay at one of the Disney properties, it really is like a magic key that does everything. And if you intend on doing the multiple day thing, I'd highly recommend staying "on property" and taking full advantage of all the Disney conveniences such as the transportation, food service (which was very good), and even little things such as having your purchases sent to your resort for pick up. Loved it! 

As far as the App goes, it allows you to manage your experience the whole time....in real time! Meaning you can see when your next appointment is that you have booked a "FastPass" time, where it's located, while helping you find it through the map function using GPS. My wife, who's the planner, kept her App (and us) going all the time! You can even manage your eating reservations on it as well (also, more on that later). The downside of course that all you who've used Smartphone apps that are GPS intensive is that it eats battery charge like nobody's business!

Which leads to this thing..... What is it? It's what they are calling, a "power station" these days, and this one is the EC Technologies 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh Ultra High Capacity "Power Station". It'd highly recommend it. Why?

If you can extrapolate by comparing it to either the iPad or the coffee cup; you can see that it's huge! Why this monstrocity!?! Well.... the 22400mAh requires no explanation. For a "power station" that number is huge (and apparently accurate) as well. We were able to use it virtually the entire week mostly recharging my wife's phone (and occasionally mine as well) without having to recharge it at all. The thing finally gave out the last 2 days of the trip. Oh yeah; it's CHEAP!!! $36.99 from Amazon. How is it so cheap? It has very few features on it at all, just the USB ports, charge indicator lights and a flashlight LED, plus it's not a well know company. I did do my research before buying it of course, and the reviews are excellent across the board. One reviewer even took it apart and found that it used top notch batteries and commented that it was cheap enough to even consider buying to take the individual cells out, but was too useful to do so! One caveate though; it's big and kinda heavy. So if you aren't carrying a decent sized pack (I was), then it will weigh you down with it's 15.36 oz weight!

 

If there were anything else that was indispensible, it was these 2 items. The top of course, was my ThinkPad X1 which happily greeted me at the beginning and end of each day. I used it for the normal stuff in the few minutes I had at thoses times and not much more needs to be said about it since I've written on it in past posts. The other item, I've touched on a little previously, but not in detail, so I'll talk more about it here. It's my Lenovo F-800 "Multi-Mode" Drive. Here's what it does: it's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external drive, WiFi access point (via the Ethernet port), WiFi streaming device (of media files stored in it's shared folder) either to computers logged on to it or Smartphones/Tablets running it's App.....oh yeah, it is also self-powered with it's internal battery as well as able to charge other devices as a charge station! We used almost all of those functions! On the roughly day and a half car trip, it served up movies to the children via their iPads in the back seat. No more cords! At Disney, I used it as a "dump station" for when I filled up the camera's memory cards (I carried 5). In some of the hotels, we used it as an Internet access point if the WiFi signal wasn't very strong. It's been so useful, it has replaced the HooToo Tripmate Nano which requires external power and found a permanent place in my technology bag! It's list price is $250, but I got mine on "special" directly from Lenovo for $100.

 

There was one other little thing..... we drove the hour or so East to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Let's just say that it was amazing and for someone like me (born in 1960) it fulfills one of my "bucket-list" items. The Atlantis exhibit was most impressive and brought back memories of the Challenger and Columbia which made me emotional.

Is there more to say? You bet, but that needs to be in another post where I'll discuss the various issues of photographing the Disney vacation!