Storage Is Driving Me Crazy!

OK; maybe this "Fisheye" view of the Fermi labs' data center is stretching it a bit, but I've gone a bit storage crazy lately. I guess, my little digital world at home is a microcosm of our data oriented world at large. I have a lot of data, and it seems to be growing at an exponential rate. The main source of the growth is my movie ripping project. At this point, I'm at about 325 films. This creates two issues. One is the "basic" file of the movie once the incription has been stripped away. It's a pretty big file. That's why I use Handbrake to crunch it down to a more manageable 1-1.5Gb file in an MP4 format. This gives me a relatively decent looking picture on a small screen such as a tablet or even notebook computer. However, I don't want to get rid of the original file, so I don't have to rip the thing again in the future. Of course, that leaves me with a lot of data to store. Just the MP4s alone add up to 400Gb of data..... and I'm not even halfway through my library!

As I'm accumulating this stuff, I've progressively felt a "space"-crunch. Given that my server had 2, 2Tb drives in it, plus a 3Tb backup, I'm not certain that's real, or just my head playing games with me! Be that as it may, I start adding drives at the end of the summer. Here's how it went down. I bought Hitachi drives whenever I could. Based on my experience and things that I've read, they seem to be the best bet on a $$$ vs. life-span equation. I used to be a Western Digital guy, but over time, my loyalty such as it is, has progressively moved over to Hitachi. Now, that they've been bought out by the big WD, I guess the issue is moot. In the last several months, I found a few good deals and bought 1, 2Tb, and 2, 1.5Tb Deskstar drives. The 2Tb one went into the file server and took the last spot on the HighPoint caching RAID controller giving it 6Tb of internal storage. The 1.5Tb drives have gone to live in the workstation to augment the 1Tb drive that was rapidly filling up. I've configured it where one of them is permanently attached (like the 1Tb drive), and the other residing in one of the two "hot-swap" bays. This will give not only quadruple the storage space, but will allow me the ability to use it as "removable mass storage". I can put LOTS of data on that drive; kick it out without opening the case, and plug it into the file server moving the data at SATA III bus speed!

As things like this seem to happen, more storage possibilities fell on me "out of nowhere". While discussing selling/trading a laptop drive with someone, he offered me a Toshiba Canvio, external hard drive case (with power supply) for almost nothing. Of course I took it! Actually, it's a clone of the 3Tb external that I have attached to the file server as a "backup". The interface is USB 3.0, so pretty quick. Now, all I have to do is find a deal on a big disk to go in it. Most likely, it'll be a Toshiba, as they seem to run specials on them regularly after Toshiba ended up with most of Hitachi's desktop drive manufacture capacity during that sell-off. I'm not real certain what I'd do with another 2 or 3Tb external drive, but you know what they say: "you can never have too much storage".

As if the portable side of my digital life was feeling left out, things started hopping there as well. While looking for drives, I ran across a 2.5" Orico USB 3.0 drive enclosure for cheap ($12). So, I bought it and put a spare 500Gb drive in it. This thing gave me the ability to move large amounts of data around quickly due to the USB 3.0 interface. Very convenient when both my brother-in-law AND I were ripping our movies and need a good way to consolidate the files on one drive. The almost 400Gb of movies fit on there great.

WAY better than what had been my one and only USB 3.0 device; the iOmega SSD Flash drive. While it's super fast with a 1.8" Intel X18 SSD in it; the storage size of 80Gb wasn't big enough to do anything serious. Essentially, it's just a big flash drive.

Right in the middle of all this, I started working on my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project. An outgrowth of it was to use my Lacie Porsche Design external drive enclosures.The only issue here was that not only was the enclosure IEEE-1394 (Firewire) interface, but internally, it's IDE/PATA! After digging around, I was able to find that I had a Seagate (I know, I know...I had it, so what're ya gonna do?) that came out of an old machine. Now I need to find another one, (hopefully, this time, a non-Seagate) for the it's twin. While working on that project, I learned from another "ThinkPadder" that you can buy an UltraBay 2000 adapter that will take SATA drives. This will give me the ability to put in any size I want in the internal bays of the A31 up to 12.7mm in height. I believe the largest capacity of that physical size is 1.5Tb. However, I'll go with a Seagate 500Gb drive that came in a machine I was given when they upgraded. I know; another Seagate, but it's hard to turn down free!!!

While all the storage madness was going on..... I filled out a survey. "What you talkin' about Willis!?!" OK, I didn't just fill out a survey, but wrote a review too, on my "new" X1. In return, Lenovo sent me a coupon for a promotion to get an F800, Multi-Mode storage device for half off! What is it? It's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external hard drive with it's own battery (which can charge other devices like phones), and a built-in access point. You might have also notice the Ethernet port as well. And you'd be right! It can function as a network "bridge" as well! Hard to tell from this picture, but imagine an regular 2.5" portable drive, but fatter.

That's 7! I've added 7 terabytes of storage in the last month....and I'm not even through. I'll probably add another 2 or 3 over the course of the next few months as well. I'm a little be astounded myself.

You Win Some....and You Lose Some

I really hate losing, but sometimes it happens and you have to give in and decide to stop throwing time away. I had a client who a few years ago bought an IBM ThinkPad R52 from me and he (mostly his family) have been rough on their machines. They have 4 of my machines and one HP desktop that I rebuilt for him in their house.....and they have to have the OS rebuilt on a regular basis. A week ago, he brought me the two ThinkPads, one of which had a simple WiFi settings issue that I resolved and sent right back, but the other "blue-screened" immediately on Windows start up. "No big deal", I thought; I can just pull the drive, connect it to one of my USB adapters and pull the files off. Then I'll put it back in and reload the OS from restore disks.....no fuss, no muss. 

That was the plan anyway. Several days, and twice as many different data recover utilities later, the drive steadfastly refused to mount....on any computer. So I put it in the (previously) fail-safe backup, which is to use a ThinkPad drive adapter that fits in their UltraBay. I don't know why that one always worked; maybe it give the drive a little more voltage, but that failed too! Down to the last straw, I put it in the freezer over night and gave that old technique a try. Still no joy. So, I'm going to write it off as a mystery since I don't hear anything physically wrong with it like rattling or even the dreaded clicking.

Now, on to the "Win Some" part. NO, that's not a bigger picture of the bad drive, it's a 500Gb Travelstar. I've always coveted these big drives, but never could pull the trigger on one given their price and my lack of real need for one. But the other day, I was having to go up to the Carrollton suburb of Dallas to pick up that $99 HP desktop for our friends as well as a copy of OS X "Snow Leopard" to restore the MacBook when I came across and ad for one of these for $40 on Craig's List. I texted the guy and promptly forgot about it. A few hours later he texted me back to say that he still had it, but someone was going to buy it, so I offered him $35 and asked him to call me if his buyer didn't materialize. I was in Irving which is the far side of Dallas. Anyway, while I was up in Carrollton running around picking stuff up, he calls to say that I can have the drive for $35 and that he'd meet me on my way home: BONUS! Sometimes you see things on CL that are great deals, but it's not worth the time and gas to go get it at the various far-flung parts of the Metro-plex. 

 On the way home, I swung in to Mesquite and picked up one of the many Dell Latitude D6x0 Series machines that I've sold. This was a computer that I recently had to completely rebuild and move to an new base, because the client dropped it while it was running! Well, I got it back to him the other day, but he called me back to say that after that first time at McDonald's, he could never get it to connect again via WiFi. So I got it home and did the usual things to it like going with a different connection manager (Dell vs. Windows), dumped and reload drivers, but still no go. I did notice that it was hanging on to a weird IP that it was using with the Ethernet. So I surmised that it was having an issue with TCP/IP. Sure enough, after a little bit of Googling, I came across a post of somebody talking about a corruption in the TCP/IP stack that was messing up Winsockets. I hadn't heard Winsockets since the Windows 3.11 days when you had to load and set that up yourself! So I had it do a rebuild (using DOS) and it magically fixed the problem. 

On a side note, the Snow Leopard disk I picked up was used to clear and reload the MacBook I bought in the pawn shop and is now listed on Craig's List for twice what I paid for it. I guess I should have really called this post, Win Some and Lose One. Still hate losing any though.....