August 17, 2007
New Tools
As shown in the earlier post, here is a picture of my new Data Robot or DROBO.
It is basically a raid (not really) based external USB storage unit. I had been looking for some sort of spanned storage solution for a while in the 2TB range and this seems to fit the bill.
I ordered it with 4 x 500GB WD CAVIAR 16MB SATA DRIVES. Installation was simple as pie. It took more time to open the packaging than doing the actualy install. Basically plug all of your drives into the Drobo, connect the power and USB cable and you are done. It shows up as a drive in Windows Explorer. At this point you can install the Drobo Dashboard which gives you some capacity measurements and fancy graphs. I don't think this is required.
I had looked at several NAS units. Buffalo Livestation 2TB and the Lacie 2 TB NAS. I liked the idea of plugging them into the router. I did not like that, it seemed to me, the way you upgraded capacity. With DROBO, I can just HOT swap drives to add additional storage. Without having to actively rebuild the array. That was not the case with the others.
So this seems to work for me for now. The only problem I have is that one of my four drives was DOA, so that is going back to vendor for a replacement.
Latitude D830
This was the other item that arrived at the household today. I got this using my NAPP membership discount. It's spec'd with 1.8 Intel Duel Core 800 MHZ FSB 2 GB RAM 80GB 7200 RPM drive 128 MB video card and the other associated stuff that comes with a laptop.
I went with the Dell basically for price and features. I like a trackpoint, so that means either a Thinkpad or a Dell. I also specifically wanted discrete video. 128 MB is not huge, but it's 128 MB more than I have now. The other thing I wanted was Windows XP, which is getting harder and harder to find these days. Vista still has too much growing to do before I would move my photo apps onto that type of build. Between the video, dual core, and the extra RAM it should run most of my photo aps just fine.
The main reason I went with Dell though was price With my discount I got about $550 off the spec price. That and I could lease it for business through Dell Buisness Leasing (direct write off for me) and here is my new tool.
So now I will be spending the next few days doing installs and migrating data.
