New "Propulsion" System for The Stealth

Let me start by apologizing for not having posted for over a month. Of course, you might remember that I was involved in a move, and any of you who have moved an entire family home with kids that's you've been in for over 10 years..... well..... you know! A big Thank You goes to everyone from my in-laws, to some of my students and to my friend Daniel who drove up from his home over an hour away! With all that support, we turned a difficult situation into a workable solution. Anyway, we're mostly done now and things are slowly going back to normal. There's no more sure sign of that than the "Skunkworks" getting back into operation.

For the "Stealth", that means a new "engine" along with a few other "bells and whistles". I'm a practical guy, and in light of that, I built the current version of my desktop workstation with pretty much only what was necessary, vs. what I really wanted. Since that time, the 256Gb SSD that held the OS has been upgraded to 512Gb, and the 1Tb "scratch" drive became 2, 1.5Tb drives. Even the fairly low-powered Radeon HD 7750 graphics card got upgraded to an HD 7870. So, pretty much the only major part from the original build that hadn't been upgraded was the CPU. Although, much of that could be attributed to the efficacy of the Intel Core i5 3450s "Ivy Bridge" chip, it's not as if I didn't dream of having a big-boy i7!

That little fantasy finally came true about a week ago. Let me go off the path a little and talk about how this situation presented itself. Everybody pretty much knows that I'm pretty frugal and will only splurge if an extraordinary situation presents itself. So; here's what happened...

I bought a Dell! An OptiPlex 7010..... Oh No No!!! I don't mean I bought this vanilla appliance of a computer to use from myself. As soon as it arrived, I promptly removed it's processor (i7 3770), and put it into the "Stealth"! So, here's the story behind the story. These Optiplexes, the working "drones" of the office world are sold in the untold tens/hundreds of thousands, with the vast majority equipped with i3 or i5 processors. Sometimes though..... you'll find ones which were sold with an i7! .....and those are the diamonds found in the figurative pile of coal. Most surplusers don't bother to look closely at the palleted hundreds or thousands other than to occasionally pull the drives for crushing when required to do so. Generally, they have the hard drives DOD wiped and sell them for what they can get, quickly so to clear the warehouse and do it all over again. However, you do sometimes find an outfit that will actually pull the entire specification list and post it in their listing. Of course, there are buyer like me out there mining eBay, but not as many as you might think. So, I bought the whole thing for about $300. That's not much more than the typical selling price ($225-275) of the i7 3770 alone and therefore you get the rest of the computer "for free". When you take into account, a fully working machine of this type with a typical (i3 or i5) processor will often sell for around $300, you see where this is going, right? As they say; "the rest is history". I put an i5 back in it and have a client for it at the price of the machine. That's right.... i7 upgrade for free!

Did the Skunkworks do anything else? Well..... I always wanted more RAM and to try water-cooling..... therefore, I chased down a "customer return" Corsair H110 sealed-loop water cooler on Amazon for $80 shipped ($140 MSRP), and caught a sale for 16Gb (2 x 8Gb) more of the Corsair Vengeance RAM on Newegg for $75 (free shipping). With the much more compact water-cooler in place of the massive Cooler Master Hyper 212Evo, I could now access the RAM socket closest to the CPU, thus allowing the memory upgrade!

I'd say that the current version of the Blackbird is as close to being finished as it's going to get! It should be good for at least another year or two. Right now the specs my workstation are as follows:

• Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H Motherboard
• Intel "Ivy Bridge" i7 3770 CPU
• Corsair DDR3 Vengeance RAM, 32Gb (4 x 8Gb)- Maximum for this chipset
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2Gb DDR5 GPU
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7750 2Gb DDR3 GPU
• Crucial MX-100 512Gb SSD
• Hitachi 1.5Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
• Hitachi 1Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
• Optiarc DVD+RW Optical drive
• Optiarc Blu-Ray Optical drive
• Seasonic M12 80 Plus Bronze 850w PSU
• Lenovo ThinkVision L220x (1680 x 1200) S-PVA Monitors (2x)
• Lenovo ThinkVision L1940p (1440 x 900) Monitors (2x)
• Cooler Master Cosmos II case

... So They Loaded Up The Truck and Moved To... Terrell!?!

Although this image is from the remake, those of you who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's will remember the Clampetts well! The reruns would be on the TV virtually every day during my childhood and of course the opening credits played with the scene of the family moving to "Beverly; Hills... that is...". That is exactly what I feel like right now as we're in the countdown till the big move next week. We finally have the closing dates for ours and the house we're buying nailed down (sort of) and are scheduling the move date. So, what am I up to?

This of course... well duh! Yup, less than a month before we head back to school. We teachers have less time than that. So yes indeed: we are walking the tightrope of prepping for school (both for ourselves and the kids) while moving to a new home. It's a little stressful....

 

This time is a little different than the previous 7 in that my son Josh is headed to middle schools (grades 7 and 8 here). I taught that age group for much of my career so I'm well aware of all the issues, so that part isn't so bad. Besides, I'm just down the street at the high school and he'll be in a school staff by my former colleagues. I do have to get ready for a one issue though. Perversely; from a technology standpoint, our school district is much better prepared to deal grades 5 and 6 as they issue those kids the Dell Latitude 2100.

True: it's not the most advanced notebook ever with it's 10" screen and Atom processor, but it was rugged and came with 2Gb of RAM. No I'm not joking. That 2Gb is FAR superior than the 1Gb they put in the ThinkPad X200 that they bought for the high school and don't get me started on the 512Mb that was spec'd for the X61 of the middle school machines!!! It's so bad that the majority of the students don't check out school machines any more, preferring to BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), or the most prevalent solution, use a smartphone. You can imagine what that does for efficiency when they have to actually have to do something productive; oh like type a paper.... 

 

You're probably thinking: "surely your son has a notebook computer", and of course, he does and has had since he was 4 or 5. In fact, he's now on his 5th or 6th generation of notebooks, having started with an A22p and most recently using a T500. Which gets me to my story. If you're the least bit familiar with that 15.1", 6+ pound machine you'll understand that it's a wonderful "workhorse" computer eminently suitable for the combo school work-Minecraft job it had been doing..... while sitting immobile on his desk. However, the concept of having a slightly built 12-year old packing it to and from school daily in a backpack probably isn't an ideal solution. At first I considered moving him to a smaller-lighter-slightly derelict T400 I have sitting around, but really; it isn't that much smaller and lighter. "What to do", says the propellerheaded dad?

The obvious solution is to buy another computer, right? You guys know me too well! In this case, there's more to it than my losing battle with TAS (Technology Acquisition Syndrome), but hey; we all have our little issues, right? Anyway; lets look at the decision matrix. Starting with the fact that school desks are NOT any bigger than when you and I went to school with nothing more than paper and pencils. Despite what the politicians would like you to believe, they are not building the schools any different than they used to. Sure, they add projectors, some Ethernet jacks and a WiFi AP in each room, but the rooms themselves are the same. As in the same size, with the same sized desks in there, with more students by the way (but that's another issue altogether). So you have a desk surface with the same size that they used to have, but the students are expected to have a notebook computer AND paper and pencil on there as well! Which gets us back to the original issue with the model of computer. If you compare the actual difference between the T500 and T400 side-by-side, there's not that much to give between them. Sure the T400 feels lighter, but the reality is that even the "S" model isn't that much better. Solution? You're lookin' at it..... The X-Series of ThinkPad! These machines were designed from the ground up to be "sub-notebooks" meaning between 3 and 4 pounds of carry weight, and a footprint based on a 12" screen. I kind of already knew this as my experience with them go back to the original X20 way back in my IT days in Chicago. In fact, I've owned every model between the X2x, X3x, X4x, X6x, and up to the X30x that have been my personal machine before the current X1. However, my detour through the X300/301/X1 had left me in the bigger screened branch of the line and have forgotten about the 12" machines since the demise of my daughter's X61. At this time, I'm not going to regale you with the process of deciding between relatively recent 12" models, but will simply say that I ended up at a working X220 at $59, but missing parts.

If you haven't read my old stuff before or I haven't made my point: here's the deal. These are ABSOLUTELY, the notebook computers to target!!! Let's start with that it was $59..... less than $80 after shipping. It was missing the A/C adapter, hard drive, drive bay cover, but had the critical battery! It was missing everything I had and mostly didn't want and had the one relatively expensive piece to replace. The X220 is the "Sandy-bridge" i5/2520m core version of these machines and is only 2 generations off of being current. Additionally, the 4Gb of RAM it did have was in the form of 1 module, giving me the ability to simply put in another to max it out to 8Gb (which I did immediately). The missing hard drive was going to get pulled and replaced with a 120Gb Intel 330 SSD out of his old machine anyway. Oh yeah, least I forget that I had to spend $1.96 to buy a drive-bay cover. Woe is me! Need I say that I have a drawer full of ThinkPad A/C adapters and that he'll be able to go anywhere in the house without having to move one. And since his and my schools have both been equipped with ThinkPads for years, there'll be A/C adapters everywhere! This might very well be the slickest upgrade I've done in years!

 Now that I'm feeling good about myself..... 

 

Tablet Upgrade Time

My digital lifestyle has never really gotten tablet-centric. As much as I wanted to love them, I ended up being the lone holdout in our household. Yes, I would carry my ThinkPad "Slate", Android tablet around on occasion, but more times, than not, I wouldn't use it and even took to avoiding toting it altogether since it was so big and heavy. It turns out that getting the larger (10") class of tablet was a mistake for me. That made it too close to the "ultrabook" class of laptops that I was already using. 

 

At the time that I picked up the tablet, I was using the ThinkPad X300, and over the 3+ years since, I've gone on to the X301, followed by the X1. All of these machines are on, or close to the cutting edge in terms of "thin and light" for notebook computers...... which unfortunately, put the rather "heavy-weight" 10.1" ThinkPad Tablet too close in carry-load. And obviously, one of the very cool features of that tablet; that of the keyboard/folio, became a non-entity since it push the size and weight squarely into the notebook range! Don't get me wrong: the tablet was a very nice example of it's type and it's large IPS display made it and excellent reader and media display. ......But....... there was just not enough of a differentiation between it and my notebooks of choice!

Interestingly, it was the exact opposite usage model of my wife, who's notebook is a ThinkPad T500 with a 15" screen. This machine weighs between 5 and 6 pounds (maybe a little more since it has the extended 9-cell battery) making the difference between it and her iPad Air marked! For her, carrying around the laptop isn't an option, but the iPA really a none issue especially since she quite commonly lugs around a good sized bag with all manner of school teacher stuff in it. So it became pretty obvious to me that downsizing was going to a good answer for my tablet woes.

Now..... if I were a rich man..... (I'll save you the musical quote), I'd buy myself the Sony Xperia Z3 tablet and be done with it. It has a truly excellent (although, non-OLED) display and really nice metal construction giving it a nice thin profile and cutting the weight. It also has the ability to connect to and stream PS4 games from that console. Pretty cool if you own the console.

Think, somewhere between an iPad Air and Mini in size with similar feel. It's NICE!!! Somewhere between $450 and $500 worth of nice. Again, iPad Air comparisons are appropriate, but it runs Android. Yeah right..... now back to the real world of Frugal Propellerheads!

So, that's where this..... the nVidia Shield Tablet: he "poor man's" super-tablet comes into the picture. We can start with the list price being $300. That's not peanuts, but it's $200 less than the Sony for pretty much the same capabilities AND has a few tricks up it's sleeve. OK, I'll put you out of your misery and go ahead an tell you that I gave $185 for mine off of eBay. The seller stated that he was having trouble with WiFi connection, so I took the chance that he either had bad location on his access point location or didn't know what he was doing. I don't have any idea which is was, but I can say, I've had no issues with it at all. Is it the strongest at pulling in a signal? No, but neither is it terrible. I have to switch from one AP to the other when I move to opposite ends of my house, but I have to do with with most of my other devices as well. So yeah..... that's right...... $185!!! That's a pretty good deal in my book for arguably the #2 Android tablet on the market today after the Nexus 9! 

 

I did say "some tricks up it's sleeve" didn't I? A couple of posts ago, I talked about nVidia's Shield concept of being able to stream games. Over the course of the last 3 years, they've grown the concept and fleshed out the product line to include original Shield Portable running the Tegra 4, followed by the Shield Tablet the next year running the K1 processor and this year has seen the release of the Shield Console with the X1. All optimized for gaming with customized GPUs. So, not only do you have a device good at Android games, but the ability to play PC games from your gaming computer, but nVidia's Grid streaming service as well. That's a lot of capability. When you throw in Android emulation apps..... this device is literally "a game changer" (no pun intended)!

Most of you know that I'm not much of a gamer, but the fact is; I'm a sucker for interesting (cool) technology! And this family of products is definitely cool! Plus it's price-point makes it darn near irresistible! I do have another rationale in that I'm the sponsor of our school's computer club. Gaming and gamers are a big part of that. Shouldn't I be fully up to date on that part of the computing world!?!

When In Taipei......

So, last week; I was in Taipei..... OK, that's not the norm, but as it happened, I went to Taiwan earlier this month to see family. Not counting travel time, I was "on the ground" about a week. Minus the 2 days spent traveling around, I was in Taipei itself about 5 days. Of course, when a geek is in arguably the epicenter of geek-dom, you obviously do some "geek" things! During my last visit there about 4 years ago, I went over to the Guang Hua Digital Market...... with family in tow. In case I really need to tell you; this is NOT how one should do this!!!

 

This image doesn't fully give you an idea of what this place is like, but let me help with a description. Think of a miniature Galleria without the skating rink. There are about 6 levels each of which is laid out racetrack style with shops on each side of the walkway. 

Then imagine that the vast majority of shops looks something like this.....

 ...... or like this!!! Oh yeah; that's pretty much alike, but there are something in the order of 30-50 on each upper 5 levels. The ground level has some open areas with a food court. It's pretty much sensory overload, and that's without the intense crowds of people there! There are actually other smaller shop areas in the surrounding area around Guang Hua, but that's the main area. Plus; next door, they've recently built a similar sized building which the major tech manufacturers have their "show-case" area! I could have probably spent all 5 days there and not seen everything! And guess what I bought?

 Some braided lightning cables......

...... and a kinda generic wireless gaming mouse for my son...... really. BUT WHY!?! you ask? Well.... because at the end of the day, when you've done the $ vs. NT (Taiwan money) calculations, the majority of bigger ticket items or cheaper when bought in the U.S......really. It's actually the little items like these cables and mice that are cheaper there in Taipei! I think that mouse was like $6-7 and those cables were around $5 apiece, vs. twice that for the mouse and 3 times that for the cable at home. Everything else from memory to tablets can be found cheaper on Newegg or Amazon, and you don't have to worry about having to try and over-write the Chinese language firmware!

Was I disappointed with my excursion? Absolutely not! I like to look around. This was like shopping on the Internet, but having everything right there in front of me! And for a time, I enjoyed the hustle and bustle of Taipei as well. But I sure am glad to be back at home to the land of full-size vehicles and air conditioning everywhere!

Swing Through West Texas

Right in the middle of my "end of year" came an unexpected trip to the "panhandle" region of West Texas. This came as a result of my needing to represent the family at a funeral outside of Lubbock, which then led to a quick run up to Amarillo to visit my wife's family. For all of you who have been out there, all this home nostalgia resulted in many hours of driving down straight flat highways! You needn't feel too badly for me, as I used all those hours in a useful manner.

 

 Most of it was a "shake-down cruise" for the Tahoe. If any of you have ever lived in Texas (and driven around it) for any length of time; you'll understand why the Tahoe/Suburban is the national vehicle of Texas! They're even made right here in Arlington! Let me start by saying that it's absolutely the most comfortable highway cruiser I've ever driven, bar none! The wife and kids just love it. From a propellerhead standpoint, it's got everything guys like me would need. Although the kids watched movies on their tablets via the wifi enabled Lenovo F800 storage drive (which was and still is awesome), the in-vehicle entertainment system did come into play. 

That system has an external input, and so before we left, I swung by our storage unit and dug the Nintendo Gamecube out of my son's stuff. It was a hit! I also bought one of those prefab plastic storage consoles which not only held all their drinks, but the controllers and games as well. This complete with headphones made the rear of the vehicle an isolated "kid-zone" leaving me to enjoy the hours of stress-free driving while listening to the connected iPod! 

This led to my wife and I reminiscing about our youth spent traveling in vehicles with interiors like this! Ahhh.. the days of burning your thighs on the vinyl seats and hands on the door handles!

While we were out there, I of course picked up some work for myself. One of my friends who's Australian and obsessive (does this go together?), handed me 3 of his many laptop computers which have problems of one kind or another. Two of them are the 2 models of the no longer produced ThinkPad X30x series, but one was something new to me. A Sony Vaio SZ series ultra-portables. This one was the SZ650n which is really a very nice machine from the C2D (Core 2 Duo) generation and a very nice machine indeed (although a bit obscure). This series of machine were really feature rich and nicely engineered, but very expensive and sold poorly. It came with Vista which by now is a very old load. it needed a reload of something that wasn't Vista! Of course, Windows 7 is an obvious solution. However, lets just say that finding drivers for an unusual machine, for an operating system it was never designed to run, with slightly obscure hardware isn't straight forward! Yes, the graphics sub-system is a hybrid setup with onboard Intel G31 integrated GPU, coupled with an nVidia GS 8400m stand-alone chip as well. Of course, this weird set-up caused W7 to steadfastly refuse to load anything other than "standard XGA" drivers. The old drivers from Sony's site refused to load because it was for Vista, the W7-64 drivers from nVidia gave an error message for unknown reasons. This led to the use of Google to sort through the huge number of returns to find an acceptable drivers. Finally, this morning; success! I'd be sitting here doing a chair dance if this machine wasn't so dog-slow!!!

Back to the galley now, I suppose.....

Back With A Tech-Vengence!!!

Inside my head, this is what my world has been like for about the last month! Of course, this all started when we left in a huge hurry (to beat a winter storm) for Disney back in March. I had just thought that getting that trip out of the way would be a relief..... Yeah; it didn't turn out that way. Naturally, there's the usual end of the school year stuff, such as state testing for the "end of course", then there was my AP class's "national exam", then other stuff such as prom, UIL Academic competition for which we qualified for regionals this year, our own kids' end of year stuff, all capped by yesterday's annual "International Food" day and the Computer Club's last game night! Makes me tired just thinking about it!

Oh..... Did I forget to mention that we are selling our house...... and obviously trying to find a new one right in the middle of all this? Yeah! We are! Which of course means that we are living in a house recently cleared of all the normal things that people have in their houses so that we can make believe that we normally live in a half-furnished house. 

As if that wasn't enough; the last two months have been a constant flow of computer jobs for people with broken PCs, or needing new machines. At any given time, there are anywhere from 1 to 3 computers sitting here waiting for me to find time to fix or the arrival of parts.

Then, a month ago, we decided it was time to replace our 13 year old SUV. The old Trailblazer had served us well, but it was pretty much "fish or cut bait" time. Meaning that we either needed to spend a few thousand dollars to keep it for a another few years, or sell it to buy another vehicle. Obviously, by the picture, you can see that we sold it and bought a Tahoe instead. While you are scratching your head in wonder, let me give you my rationale on buying this land-yacht. We can start with, it's bigger and has way more capability, move on to that it gets several miles per gallon better than the Trailblazer (!!!) and only costs $2000-3000 more than the mid-sized SUV of today such as the Traverse/Acadia/Expedition. Yes indeed, these things do/did sticker at around $50K (about $55K for this one), but I bought this 2012 for just south of $30,000 with about 50,000 miles on it. I will at some point, write an entire post on this topic. Just not today! Pretty big deal, right? Why not go ahead and write on it?

I got a little distracted along the way! For those who don't recognize it immediate; this is nVidia's family of "Shield" products.

You might remember a couple of years ago that virtually any place that sold consumer electronics was overrun with advertisement material on this thing..... the nVidia Shield "Portable". I'll have to admit that it took me some time to even figure out that it was, although it was undeniably cool looking! At it's core, it's a full Android device; optimized for gaming with some really cool tricks, but still pretty much a tablet.... with an analog controller attached..... and a giant battery (28.8wh). Granted, the screen's only 5", but hey. Why this from an admitted "non-gamer"? Several things really. The technology is very cool! Not only, is it clearly a "game-changer" for Android gaming, but it's a premo multi-use device which I have a true weakness for and WOW: WHAT an amazing set of features! OK; so there's the Android stuff, then there's the gaming controller, but that's not even the really interesting part! If you have a certain level of nVidia graphics processor (GTX 650) and up, you can stream your games from a PC through your wireless network to this device and pretty much play full-on PC level games on it's 720p screen. Oh, and it doesn't end there! The current updates allow the machine to stream this content over the internet as well. nVidia also has a game content streaming system in Beta that will allow you to game, "netflix" style as well! All this capability was too much to resist, so when I was able to find one at $178, I bought it. I'll have to admit, that in some ways, I'm a bit like a stereotypical woman in that I will often respond to stress by shopping! More?

 

 "As you wish" Well..... earlier in the week, I actually picked up a controller. What!?! You thought that it was already a controller? That's the gamepad looking thing next to that tablet...... the Shield Tablet that is. Yes, their is in fact more to this story. That, is my tablet upgrade target for the summer. Sadly, my ThinkPad Tablet (gen 1) is getting "long in the tooth", and even regular apps are behaving sluggishly on it. The battery life it really becoming a bit of a problem as well. So now, after 3+ years of service, it's time for it to be replaced. My original thought was to walk "into-the-light" and pick up an iPad Mini and become integrated into the Borg, but this whole Shield thing has given the "Rebel Alliance" side of me new life. The year after introducing the Shield "Portable", nVidia released the Shield Tablet. Mostly the same concept, but instead of being game-centric, this one is at least equally tablet. Allbiet a very powerful one with the K1 processor (vs. the Tegra 4). As reference, my ThinkPad Tablet has a Tegra 2. However, being an nVidia Shield device, it's optimized for games and set up to integrate the "Shield Controller" which has even better useability than the "Portable". 

There's even more cool stuff to this as these devices as they can be put in a "console mode", attached through HDMI to a larger screen (real large TV) and used as a...... well...... console system! Those of you who know me (either personally or through my blogging) have probably concluded that there's a bigger picture here somewhere. Why yes..... now that you ask! You might remember that for my son's birthday, I built him a small gaming computer. Well.... I'm about to replaced the graphics card in it for an nVidia GTX 650! The Shield Portable will ultimately become his as well; probably for Christmas this year. I will ultimately move myself on to the Shield Tablet and we'll be all set to move on to the next level of digital nirvana.

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!