The Portable Workstation

Going back to the beginning, my very first laptop computer that is, I've always had a bit of an obsession with "ultra-portability" and the concept of the portable/mobile workstation. I'll define that here as being a computer and peripherals having the capability of doing jobs that are generally considered to be within the province of full-sized desktop computers. I'll have to say that I was able to get started in good style with the IBM ThinkPad 701c (sometimes known as the butterfly). As machine so small that a full-sized keyboard was too large for, and had to be able to fold and unfold into!

As cool and interesting as that machine was though, it wasn't really the whole story. I took the concept to another level by finding the IBM 5183 Portable Printer along with the Logitech Scanman II to pair with it. This gave me be the capability of pretty much doing anything I wanted, anywhere I wanted, without even an electrical outlet. If you're unfamiliar with the computer, it's really smaller than what the image would indicate. That screen is only 10.4"! So this whole rig pretty much fit in a regular sized computer bag and weighed no more than just a more normal sized laptop by itself. I was hooked!

In the years after that, my portable machines grew as they progressed from legendary 600, then on to the the "T" Series. I was happy with these machines, but often would lament the lack of extreme portability that the "Butterfly" had given me. Then one day the ThinkPad folks dropped the X300 bomb on us! When the price for them finally came back down to earth, I bought a nice used one several years ago. 

 

This became the core of my "next-gen" portable workstation. It paired nicely with Canon LIDE scanner that I had at the time and I even dabbled in the Pentax Portajet thermal printer (the world's smallest printer). The idea received it's most significant use and "proof-of-concept" when tragically my mother-in-law passed away due a car accident during the holidays one year. I had the whole rig with me at the time since we were vacationing with my in-laws and I was scanning some family photos for them. That scanner got quite a workout putting together a memorial from old photographs for the funeral.

Around that time, I added another element to my little bag of tricks by adapting the recently acquired Android ThinkPad Tablet to work as a secondary screen to the laptop (which had been upgraded to the X301). This gave me a portable multi-monitor setup like I was used to at home. 

The 3rd generation of my portable workstation came about when the X3xx machines gave way to the X1. On one hand, I gave up having a built-in optical drive (which I haven't missed at all), but on the other, I gained a much nicer (and larger at 14.1" vs. 13.3") screen (the X3xx machines had notoriously bad panels), but at a resolution (1366 x 768) much kinder to my aging eyes. Although it's a 2nd gen (Ivy Bridge) Core processor, and has other upgrades such as USB 3.0 as well; it's most important function is as the "core" (forgive the pun) to the new version of portable "eco-system" if you will.

Recently, I was to again add the ability to print on the move with the HP OfficeJet H470 printer. I actually gave about $30 (after shipping) for 2, H470s and 1, H460, along with power supplies for all three as well as 2 batteries. One of the H470s has an unresolved issue, but the other one works as does the H460 that I'll probably sell to defray the cost of the whole thing. A Bluetooth wireless module ($10) is on it's way from China to allow me to go fully wireless printing. 

 

 

Of course there are other smaller items such as the Bluetooth travel mouse, the nVidia Shield tablet and the Wacom Bamboo pen digitizer that gives me other capabilites as well.

 

Those things are great, but the biggest change in this generation has to be the ability to bring massive storage to the portable realm. About a year ago, I picked up the Lenovo F800 "Multi-Drive". Essentially an access point, attached to a lithium-iom "power station", combined with a 1Tb hard drive, it gives me the ability to have a wireless NAS wherever I go. As if that wasn't enough, I picked up a Drobo Mini last summer and populated it with 4 laptop sized (2.5") drives (2, 1.5Tb & 2, 1Tb), giving me the capability to carry 5Tb of USB 3.0 attachable storage with me anywhere. This weekend, I put the 600Gb Intel 320 SSD from my wife's old laptop into the other bay of the X1. This combined with the mSATA, 480Gb SSD, gives me a total of around 1Tb of "onboard" storage, and 6Tb of either attached or wireless storage. If you'd have told me that I'd be able to do this affortably even 2 years ago; I'd have said that it was "crazy talk"!

That's a lot of cool portable stuff right!?! ....but there's more! Oh, I don't own any of it, but ..... one day..... What is it? It's the ThinkPad "Stack". What's the pieces in the Stack? One is a lithium-ion power station, another is a Bluetooth speaker, then you a portable access point, and of course, the last (so far) is a portable HDD. Each is about the size of one of those portable drives you can buy anywhere, but the cool thing about this is that they're all the same footprint and can connect to each other without wires or cables! OK; it doesn't do anything that I can't already do, but it does it in a much nicer way! I can be a little OCD.

Patience Will Win The Day

It's not the most popular of positions, but my stance on doing things technology-wise is to be patient and plan. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't do anything "spur of the moment". Buying that Minolta Rokkor-X 50mm lens is a good example. But really, even that thing is part of a greater picture of something I've been wanting to do for some time, but waited till the opportune moment.

I guess you could characterize me as a pouncing cat, waiting for it's prey. Lucky for me, that didn't equate to be an errant rabbit or squirrel!

Not too long ago, I wrote about finding a Drobo Mini at an excellent price. However, not only was the price good, but this one was pre-populated with 4 Western Digital 320Gb drives and a 256Gb Crucial M4 mSATA SSD. This item actually created an entire series of sub-moves within the original deal. Although, I have yet to sell off those 4 drives which I think are too small, but the SSD has already been installed into my ThinkPad X1, upgrading it from a 160Gb Intel 320. It also frees up the 2.5" drive bay for me to put in a 7mm drive for purely storage purposes. I've also put in some of my random stack of SATA drives in that Mini to both upgrade it's storage (one of the replacements is a 500Gb), but that frees up the WD 320Gb for sale. My plan was to slowly replace the installed drives (3 320Gb, 1 500Gb) with 1Tb Hitachi drives which I think are the best combination of price and reliability. Note the WAS.....

Then this happened. You've probably noted that the label on this drive is a little odd. Basically, all the current high capacity (1.5Tb & 2Tb) 2.5" drives have a little bulge on their covers. This necessitates that the label have a cut-out to accommodate it. This trend started with the 1.5Tb drives of which, this is one, then on to the current king of capacity, the 2Tb Samsung/Seagate drives. Well....actually, that's not completely accurate, in that most of the 1.5Tb drives which are 12.5mm in thickness don't have to have the bulge; only the ones that conform to the standard 9mm drive height. In fact, it's a bit more complex than that: there are 3 drive heights for the 2.5" (often called laptop) drives. The 9mm being the most common and therefore considered "standard", the 7mm as extra-thin (which perversely is "standard" for SSDs), and the 12.5mm which are considered non-standard as very few notebook computers have a drive bay that will accommodated a drive of that thickness. Generally, these are made to go into those external "portable" external drives that you see out there. If you see one that's 1.5-2Tb in capacity (and it's not a Seagate or Samsung), then chances are good that it's of that thickness. So there!

Why am I going on and on about this minutia regarding 2.5" drives, you ask? Well, these little bits of information mean something and can impact your purchasing decisions. Obviously, I'd like to outfit my Drobo Mini with as big of drives as I can for as little money as possible. Also, you throw in there, my little personal bias against using Seagate drives as a rule. This leaves out the current capacity champ of 2Tb. But, what about the 1.5Tb non-Seagate drives on the market? Well..... the majority of them are like the Toshiba you see above; 750Gb at the standard thickness, and 12.5mm (which does not fit the Drobo Mini) at the 1.5Tb capacity! The only exception being the VERY difficult to find Hitachi Travelstar 5K1500. I had resigned myself to using the 1Tb Hitachi which are common and can typically be found at about $50 a-pop, when my routine of checking ads bore fruit!. On Thursday, I came across an eBay listing for a Hitachi, 3.5" "Desktop". I wasn't very surprised by this since I actually have 2 of those things in my main workstation, but I decided to open the link anyway and look at it. Yes, the description was for the 3.5" "DeskStar", but the photos were of the 2.5" TravelStar! So I messaged the seller immediately and when he replied that the description was wrong, but the photos were right; I bought the thing at the $45 after-shipping price IMMEDIATELY!!!

So yeah...... this is what I was doing..... inside that is, since it'd have been a little weird for me to do this at work!

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!?!