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.

The Surprising Summer.....Tech-wise

Summer's basically over, but it went in a direction that I never really considered. Although much of it was taken up by moving my wife's teaching stuff around several times, it turned out that she was so preoccupied by it all that it left me free with quite a bit of "me time". 

It started out with a project for which I received unexpected help. As I've talked about before, my Hootoo Tripmate Nano, has revolutionized travel for the our little family, giving us the ability to share files anywhere and everywhere. Although, we didn't travel a lot this summer, what little we did allowed me to execute a "proof of concept" which was mostly in the form of serving up movies to the children via the Tripmate to their iPads while we traveled. This turned out to be the best $20 I've spent in a long time. However, this was going to require me to "rip" much of our library of DVDs into a relatively universal format. For me, that's MP4, which can basically be read by just about anything. While the "new" Ivy-Bridge based computer made short work of this little chore, by handling both parts in about 20-30 minutes; it's still 20 to 30 minutes! Enter my brother-in-law. While I has hip-deep in alligators (that's ripping my movies), they showed up from Austria for their 3 year (or there abouts) missionary furlough. While dealing with all the various pre-teen cousins running around was a pain at times, I found that he'd been doing the same thing, but was further along than I was! On top of which, he was carrying all of his ripped movies around with him on an external drive. Awesome! So, we combined forces, traded movies and ripped more. So now I'm up to somewhere between 300 and 400Gb of them in an external drive! At somewhere around 1Gb per film on MP4, that's around 300 movies! That gives me a pretty good start on this project in a pretty short amount of time.

In the meantime, everyone that I've shown the HooToo Nano to has been astounded by it's size, low cost and possibilities. Another unexpected find was that it draws a fairly low amount of power. It started with me trying to use some USB car-chargers that weren't powerful enough to charge our old Motorola smartphones or new iPhones. The Tripmate was fine with them, then, my wife realized that the "emergency battery" that was packaged free with her old Motorola Atrix HD phone was micro-USB, so incompatible with her iPhone, so it was evicted from it's previous residence in her car. After it bit of examination, it occurred to me that the Tripmate's power input was also micro-USB, so a short experiment later showed that this little battery (about the size of our iPhone 5s) would power it for around 3 and a half hours! Can you so walking-personal-cloud!!! Another "proof-of-concept" test ensued with me carrying it around with me running errands while the daughter watched movies on her iPad pretty much confirmed it.

This left me with a problem. Close to 400Gb of data that needed to be portable on a regular basis! While looking at buying externally attachable storage, I realized that I'd been hoarding a couple of 500Gb 2.5" drives for some time. While one was a Seagate Momentus XT, hybrid drive, and thus wouldn't have been put to best use as attached storage, the other was a Hitachi 5K500, 5400rpm drive that would be perfect for the job. A quick trip to MicroCenter netted me a cheap (Inland) USB 3.0 case. 

Subsequently, I found a much nicer aluminum case by Orico for $12; so now I'm set. Not too long thereafter, a repair job came along that allowed me to sell off the hybrid drive, so I'll probably take the proceeds from that and pick up a 1Tb drive as well. 

 
 Around that time, I got a little storage crazy, picking up a 7200rpm, 2Tb, Hitachi DeskStar (7K3000) that will ultimately go into the server's RAID array, and first one, then another 160Gb Intel SSD. None of these drives cost more than $55, and the average (after shipping) comes out at less than $50! 

One will go into a revived MacBook that was dead from a soft drink spill.....

.....and the other went into my most recent acquisition; a ThinkPad T400 that was picked up for about $45, complete with port replicator. It's destined to replace my son's current T61 as soon as I find another right arrow key. Anything else?

Well..... actually, I've saved the best and biggest for last! One of my former students came to me for help getting a notebook computer capable of doing CAD and other computing tasks necessary for an engineering major. After looking a several machines from different manufacturers, we settled on the Dell Precision M6x00 series. He had $1300 to work with, which translated to a top-spec'd M6600, the newer (year old) mid-spec-d M6700, or current model, but lowest spec'd M6800. The difference is largely in the spec and the processor generation of Sandy Bridge vs. Ivy Bridge vs. Haswell. I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty details, but we decided on the M6700. What did $1300 buy? As I said earlier, a middle-spec'd machine, meaning that it has an i7 (vs. i5) quad core CPU capable of running 8 threads, the nVidia K3000 "Kepler" GPU, 8Gb of RAM, and 750Gb HDD. With the money left over, I upgraded his RAM to high speed Crucial 16Gb of RAM in 2 modules, and a Crucial mSATA 240Gb SSD allowing him to use the 750Gb Western Digital "Black" mechanical HDD as storage, PLUS still leaving him another open drive bay for even more storage should he need it. That's not even taking into account the ability to install a drive module in place of the optical drive should he feel a need to do that! He came back and asked for a dock, so I'm in the process of finding that as well. It's quite a machine! Aaaand???

That's a lot! But there's a "capper". I'm not certain how I came across it because I wasn't looking for them, but I got caught up in "smartwatches". Most of you know that I'm a teacher who teaches high level classes. This doesn't afford me a lot of time to sit and contemplate my navel. So when those times occur that I'm actually waiting for a call I need to answer (such as from the doctor's office), or a text, I routinely miss it because, my phone is turned down. After watching the Sony smartwatches for a couple of years, I had decided I like the concept, but not so much the execution. Actually, I didn't want them to do more, but LESS! Then I saw the Pebble, and fell in love with it. They run about $150 or so new, which I just didn't feel I wanted to pay. I found one listed on eBay that was here in DFW for what looked like it was going to be a decent (sub-$100) price. Just as I was waiting to bid on it, my wife started talking to me and I missed it! It sold for about $82, which I was more than willing to pay. Then, just as I was getting aggravated with myself for missing the opportunity, I found another one for a $100 "Buy It Now" with a "Best Offer" option. I offered $80, the guy counted at $85 which I accepted! It was in Houston, and he got it mailed up here over the weekend at no charge. Frankly, I was happy to pay the $3 difference for not having to drive to Arlington which would have eaten up more than $3 worth of gas! So there you have it. It was a very exciting summer where technology was concerned, and virtually none of it planned!