A Deal With The Devil

I think everyone is clear on my feelings about Best Buy by now. Yet, that's exactly where I was today, AND came out of the store carrying something more than a DVD or CD. Yes indeed; I did in fact buy a computer product from the enemy. Why would I consort with "that sort"? Well, Christmas happened, and we have this family gift tradition where you draw names and this years poor misguided family member knowing that I was the "techie" type decided that a gift card from Best Buy would be in order! After cursing my fate and kicking the cat (not really),then after 3 months of head-scratching, I just couldn't think of some way to magically make it be PayPal credit. So today with daughter in tow, there I was in the lair of the great satan trying desperately to find something ....anything, that wasn't ridiculously overpriced! I had that $25, as well as a rebate card for $10 from buying RAM some time ago. So, all-in-all, I had $35; meaning I could buy something like flash storage of some sort worth the amount, or apply it to something that was in fact priced decently. So why the dump truck of earth moving proportions? Remember my last post? I'm about to embark on a server rebuild.......ahhhh......."I see, said the blind man to his deaf daughter". I have a lot of data to move. In fact I've been looking at external drive enclosures and bare drives of 2Tb (or larger) to do this with AND then to function as backup to the server of the future.

.....And on the last aisle before car stereos, stashed among the legions of Western Digital and Seagate storage was a little display of Toshiba Canvio external drives marked with little "As Advertised" signs. On one shelf were 2 boxes of the the 2Tb versions at $99.95 which is really a pretty darned good price, but sadly, the shelf directly above marked for the 3Tb ones at $119.95 was empty! While I stood there silently cursing my fate and contemplating buying the 2Tb drive, I came across one of the brainless blue-shirted automatons (Best Buy employees to the uninitiated), so I asked if he could look up the store in a neighboring suburb to see if they still had some of the 3Tb ones in stock. Twenty-five minutes later, another of the automatons came back to point out that there were several more completely somewhere else instead of the marked display. I was too overjoyed to be annoyed by this little piece of "BB" stupidity, so happily paid $85 (after expending my cards) for 3Tb of storage in an unobtrusive enclosure sporting a USB 3.0 interface. If my math is right, that's less than $30 per terabyte, meaning every dollar I spent bought about 33 gigs of storage. Just typing that makes me a little giddy. 

Oh, but this gets better! Inside of this relatively unobtrusive little box resides....wait for it......a Hitachi hard disk drive!!! I know I said that it's a Toshiba "Canvio" (whatever the hell that is), but you see, it's a bit of a convoluted tale. You guys may be aware that my preferred mechanical storage maker is/was Hitachi. It used to be IBM who sold their drive division to Hitachi. For whatever reason, Western Digital Corporation (who I don't hate, but not my fave) bought out HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) last year.

However, due to some pressure from various regulatory organizations around the world who frown on monopolies, they had to divest themselves of one of Hitachi's Chinese factories which made drives of capacities up to 3Tb. Thus enters our friends from Toshiba.

Had this been an actual Toshiba product, I'd have never bought it. The last time I had any dealings with Toshiba hard drives was when they would randomly spit up the MBR about once a year. However, I knew the desktop Canvios (???) with that peculiar 5900 rpm (actually 5940) rotational speed was actually a restickered Hitachi with their "Coolspin technology".

I don't know all the convoluted machinations of this weird triangular agreement, but I do know that there are a bunch of "Toshiba" re-labled Hitachi's out there for sale at pretty low prices compared to other brands.

All I know is that I was able to get a competitively priced ($119 is the same as Newegg) product at Best Buy where $35 of that was essentially "written off". So I paid $85 for something which was exactly what I needed, I'd have probably even bought it if it was a Western Digital or a Seagate, but that it was a rebranded Hitachi was just icing on the cake. Oh, and almost forgot to mention that the new motherboard on the rebuilt server has USB 3.0, so yeah; a perfect match for this new drive.

Screens Galore

OK, I'll own up to it.....I love screens, the more the better! You remember Hugh Jackman's hacker character in Swordfish, sitting in front of that outlandish rig that he had John Travolta's character put together for him? Something like 7, LCD flatpanels, which was crazy at the time (2001). It'd be even more so, if people know that most of them were the ultra-expensive SGI 1600SW, that sold for $2500 apiece, and that was without the special converter boxes necessary for them to run with normal graphics cards. Otherwise, you'd have to connect them with special graphics cards of which there were only a very few and expensive as well. Other than being a geek/nerd/propellerhead, I noticed them because I happened to have one of these beasties sitting on my desk at home. At that time very few people had LCDs of any kind at home, much less one of these oddities. 

Of course, since that time, LCD monitors have become common and even the use of multiple monitors is not that unusual. However, I'll have to say that I am unusual (a little bit anyway). For me, 1 or even 2 has never been enough. During the time of the SGI, I had that one in the middle and two large 19-20" CRTs on each side. It took three graphics cards to run them, but I did it. A few years back, I had read somewhere that as far back as Windows 98, Microsoft had built in the capability to resolve up to 10 displays! They should have never told me that; I've been on a monitor binge ever since.....especially now that LCDs are the norm and take up way less space.

 

Last year some time, I became aware of the "portable" monitors that were appearing on the market. They began hitting the market in the form of the various 7" Mimo models at first, then Toshiba, along with Lenovo and others. There are more, probably about 5 brands total which are really only coming out of about 2 factories. They are all pretty similar, ranging from 7" to 10", some with touch, some without, but all are USB "bus" powered, taking signal and current from the USB port of the host machine. For obvious reasons, I became enamored of them right away, imagining myself setting up with a laptop and plugging up one of these things along-side like some sort of mini-me version of the big workstation rig at home! 

Then, right around the time that I was busy trying to figure out a way to squeeze the $100-150 out of thin air, lightning struck...or more accurately; Android struck! I started getting the craving for a tablet, and you guys know where that led me. So what? End of the tiny portable monitor dream? Well.....yes, and no. I knew that if I got one of those little monitors, it'd sit in a drawer like one of my many, "love it" toys like the Bluetooth GPS receiver (to name one). The fact is that, it's a "one trick pony", so there are only so many situations in which it can be used. However; a tablet......now that's something that can have a variety of uses. 

Last night, I came up with use number 45 (or whatever it is now)......an extension monitor.....TA DA!!! I've known for some time that you can get apps that allow a tablet to connect to a computer and use it as an external monitor, but last night, I finally did it. I not only did it, but I did it in the most excessive manner possible (for me anyway)! I set it up on my desk next to the keyboard/mouse area. That's the computer that I currently have a 22" (1960 x 1200) screen, a 20" (1600 x 1200) screen, AND 19" (1440 x 900) TV/Monitor on a swivel arm mount for those times when I need a third screen. That one is on a selector box which allows me to switch between the WHS server and the workstation, as well as having the facility to connect to a DVD/VCR or TV. So anyway, I was up late playing around on the internet, when the thought struck me that maybe I should give one of those apps a try. I started out looking at the Redfly Screenslider, but didn't like that you paid the $.99, but then had to pay more to get the rest of the features on the "Pro" version. So I just ponied up the $4.99 for the one that been in this game the longest: iDisplay. After a little bit of fiddling around with the settings, it worked just fine.

So, what does one DO with a small (1260 x 800) 4th monitor? It turns out that I found the perfect use for it. Drag the music player over there and that way, I can manipulate the controls by touch! This leaves the other 3 free for editing picture, placing Adobe palettes, and monitoring file transfers. OK, really, I'll probably use it with my laptop as my extended desktop screen when I'm on the go, but need to get work done. I feel like James Bond and "Q" all rolled in one.