Last week, I took advantage of the Drobo storage robot promotion through COBA. The deadline has been extended to May 4, so if you’ve been sitting on the fence, you’ve got a little more time to decide.

Today, I went to the Fry’s Electronics to pick up some more hard drives. Though I’ve seen 500GB SATA drives selling for $120-140 online, I really wanted to get 750GB drives. Fry’s is selling 750GB drives for $220 apiece through May 1. I picked up four of them.

I’m still shocked at how my drives have multiplied over the years. My first computer was a Mac SE/30, and it had a 40-megabyte drive. Cavernous, I once thought! After today’s purchase, I have just a wee-bit over 6TB of storage broken out as follows:

• Infrant ReadyNAS: 1TB (4×250GB)
• Quad G5 PowerMac: 550GB (250GB and 300GB)
• External FW Drives: 1.25TB (5×250GB)
• SATA Drives: 3TB (4×750GB)
• Miscellaneous Drives: 250GB

Who knows what this will look like in another ten years, let alone a lifetime!

Now comes the time-consuming part, rearranging my data across all of these drives and volumes. I have several goals that I want to accomplish:

1. Consolidate External FireWire Drives: I want all the files on my external FireWire drives to be available from a single data-protected volume.
2. Backup RAW Photos: Right now, my RAW images are stored on the Infrant, a RAID5 network attached storage device.
3. Faster Access: The ReadyNAS isn’t as fast as an external hard drive, so having the photos available locally is desired.
4. Automated Sync: I definitely don’t want to be syncing data manually.

My current plan of action involves:

1. Put three 750GB drives into the Drobo
2. Start copying data from the external FW drives onto the Drobo
3. Move the contents of my 300GB internal drive onto the Drobo
4. Replace the 300GB internal drive with a 750GB drive
5. Duplicate the contents of my ReadyNAS onto the 750GB drive
6. Set up an rsync job to sync changes between the ReadyNAS and the 750GB drive

I could also put all four 750GB drives into the Drobo and use that as my primary direct attached storage device. The 300GB internal hard drive could remain in my PowerMac until I buy another 750GB drive. Decisions, decisions! Whatever I end up doing, moving all of this data is going to take some time.

Update 19:32: The Drobo has copied 90GB out of 229 GB in three hours. That’s about 8.3 MB/second, a far cry from USB2’s theoretical transfer rate of 480 Mbps, or 60 MB/second. Don’t know what’s causing things to be so slow, but it must be doing something. The Drobo’s fan is running full blast, making it louder than my already loud ReadyNas 600. Hopefully, it will quiet down when it’s not working full-time.

Update: Everytime I restart my computer, I get a Disk Unreadable error, even though the Drobo appears to mount properly on the desktop and the drive seems to be working properly. I’m running the latest version of Drobo Dashboard and the Drobo OS.

I think I know what’s happening with the disk unreadable error. USB mass storage volumes have a maximum size of 2TB. Because I put in four 750GB drives, the Drobo can have two potential volumes. One of the volumes is the first 2TB and the second is the remainder.

When I installed the drives yesterday, I did not set the jumpers on them to 3.0Gbps SATA II mode. The FAQ on the Drobo site says that it’s unnecessary, but I read a post on DroboSpace that says doing so improved performance up to 66% with Seagate drives. Since I have already copied 230GB of data, I wonder if I can pop out the drives one by one to set the jumpers. It’s early enough in the testing/copying phase that I can do this. I wouldn’t want to do it when I have a full 2TB volume!

Update: I tried removing the bottom drive in the hopes of setting the jumper, but the drive wouldn’t disengage. I had the same result with the third drive. The first drive, however, popped out just fine, and I removed the jumper, setting the drive to work at SATA II speeds. Hopefully, I’ll be able to remove the other ones and set their jumpers in order to boost performance. Right now, I’m waiting for the drives to reconfigure themselves.

Sunday Night Update: I’m currently copying another one of my 250GB hard drives over to the Drobo, after finishing a 300GB transfer earlier in the day. I ended up restarting from scratch using three 750GB SATA II-configured drives in the Drobo. I’m still experiencing some performance issues, but I’m in touch with the team from Drobo, and I hope to get those issues resolved soon. I’ll have a complete report of my experience on or shortly after the June 1st launch date for Drobo.

In the meantime, I pulled my Quicksilver out of cold storage. I bought that PowerMac back in June, 2001, and it served me faithfully for over four years. At first, I wanted to put as many of those drives into the computer and turn it into a server. I soon learned, however, that the 2001 Quicksilver doesn’t have native BootRoom support for IDE drives larger than 128GB. That means my 250GB drives would only appear as 128GB drives. Boo hoo. The other problem is that I can only fit two ATA drives in the computer without resorting to PCI cards. Though there are a total of five drive bays in the PowerMac, two are designed for SCSI drives and the third — located below the SuperDrive — was originally designed to house a ZIP drive, not another hard drive. Sigh. I ended up striping two 120GB drives and reinstalling Mac OS X.

At the end of the day, I’m left with the following tasks:

1. Move the 300GB SATA drive from my PowerMac into the Drobo. This will bring the total usable space up to around 1.6TB
2. Finish copying 2×250GB drives onto the Drobo.
3. Copy miscellaneous files from the Infrant to the Drobo. This will take up another 150GB, I suspect, leaving me with about 450GB free on the device
4. Put the fourth 750GB SATA drive into my PowerMac
5. Mirror my original RAW photos on the Infrant onto the 750GB drive in my PowerMac using rsyncx
6. Rsync my Home Directory onto the Drobo, Infrant, or a spare 250GB hard drive. I’ve been neglecting to backup this important information for far too long.

Me, I’d say this is hands down the best implementation of open source publishing technology I have ever seen, one that should serve as a wake up for any online publisher wondering if they should invest $1,000,000 in web publishing technology.

I like it when I read nice things about the site Alex and I developed!

We launched the new All Things Digital today! This will be the new home for The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist, Walt Mossberg and his partner in journalistic crime, Kara Swisher. Also joining them with witty daily videos and posts is former Good Morning Silicon Valley journalist, John Paczkowski. Expect to see tons of great content — both written and in living color — in the coming months.

Alex and I were the primary developers for the site, and we were matched with a fantastic design firm in Mule Design Studios and a kick-ass team from Automattic. Thanks go out to everyone else who helped on the project, Beth, Brian, Raanan, Lia, and John!

Read the rest of this entry »

Checking out Coda, a one-window web development application, from Panic, makers of the excellent SFTP application, Transmit. For my latest consulting project, I’m juggling with exactly the problem Coda is attempting to solve, the barrage of windows and applications needed to perform web development chores:

• Text-editor (BBEdit)
• Terminal (iTerm)
• SFTP application (Transmit)
• Browser (IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox, and Camino)
• Web Reference Books
• File Manager (PathFinder)

Coda has almost all of this integrated into one application, including collaborative editing via a licensed-SubEthaEdit engine. Coda uses WebKit, so the rendering engine will look more like Safari than FireFox or IE. My web development typically starts with coding for FireFox, then Safari, then IE/IE6. On paper, this looks like a terrific application. I’ll test it out for the next two weeks and see how I like it. The Panic guys do great work, so I expect nothing less from Coda! Here that, Steven! :)

I’ve been pretty busy with a consulting project the past month, hence my lack of regular posting. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, however. I’ll have more to say in a little over a week, so stay tuned.

I was taking a break from work last night when I saw that Rob Galbraith had posted a first look for the Canon EOS-1D Mark III Digital SLR. The subject of the Mark III was raised over dinner on Saturday with Eric. My Mark II is still going strong after 3 years, and I don’t see selling it anytime soon. I told Eric, how much more does a camera need to be before upgrading makes sense? According to Rob’s review, the Mark III has got the goods and is worth the wait. He calls it “the best full-featured SLR we’ve ever used, and its image quality is the best we’ve seen from a digital SLR in all ways except sheer resolution.” Wow. My credit card is almost flying out of my wallet.

If I do take the plunge, I can’t stop just with the Mark III. I’m going to have to buy more memory, batteries (despite their awesome performance, I still like to have at least 2 backup batteries), and a new laptop for remote work. My four-year old PowerBook G4 just isn’t cutting it anymore. Unfortunately, the timing doesn’t feel right to buy a new MacBook or MacBook Pro. It’s been 181 days since the last MacBook Pro update, which means new Books are just around the corner. After all, Apple has to show something at WWDC now that Leopard has been delayed, right?

In other photography news, Rae and I went to see the Berkeley Dance Project at the Zellberbach Playhouse at Berkeley on Saturday evening. I had shot the photo for their promotional flyer. It was good to be able to just sit in the crowd and enjoy the dance performance without the pressure of a deadline. The show runs through the 29th. My photos from the preview performance back in December are below. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

The April meeting for the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held this Wednesday, April 11, 2007, in Cordura Hall 100 at Stanford University from 7:30-10:00 pm.

Drobo Storage Robot

Drobo (http://www.drobo.com) is a new contender in the data storage field from Mountain View-based Data Robotics. Drobo is billed as the “world’s first storage robot.” In brief, Drobo acts as a large hard drive, but has several benefits over using multiple hard drives or existing RAID systems:

• Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly: Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix ‘n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.
• Drobo lets you “pay as you grow”: Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don’t buy storage capacity until you need it. Buy capacity “just-in-time” possibly saving you hundreds of dollars.
• Drobo manages storage, so you don’t have to: Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No software required. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don’t have to.

I was given a demo of the Drobo storage robot last week, and I think it’s an exciting entrant in the data storage arena. There will be a promotion for COBA members to purchase the Drobo at $200 off retail price for the month of April. If you’ve been on the fence for upgrading your storage solution at home, come to the meeting to see Drobo in person! Otherwise, stay tuned for a future mailing list announcement with pricing details.

Photo Selection Part 1

We’ve all seen it and have been guilty of it. You take hundreds or thousands of photos and throw them up onto the web for all to see. Too many photos, however, means that it becomes a chore to go through them all!

This month, we’ll begin a two-part series into how to edit and select your photos for maximum impact, on the web or in print.

Bring and share your horror and success stories as we take a hands-on approach to editing photos from several recent photoshoots.

Monthly Assignment: SPEED

Each month, COBA will feature an optional monthly assignment and contest. Members are highly encouraged to participate as the point of the monthly assignment is to motivate you to take photos, try new techniques, and learn.

Speed is the topic for this month’s assignment. Be fast or be slow, but be prepared to finish your photo in the next few days for the meeting!

Only new photographs taken from the previous meeting date to the next meeting date will be accepted. Please print a print of your photo!

Read the rest of this entry »