Our web diary

Fontanella's Italian Restaurant

Where to go for dinner? Something different, something homey, not too pricey -- good food, nice atmosphere, you get the picture.

Sean did a little web-searching and found Fontanella's Italian Restaurant in Matthews, NC. It's at the back of the Matthews Festival just off Independence Rd - we've just never really noticed it.

We each started with a nice glass of Chianti. Then Sean had the tortellini soup -- straightforward goodness in broth. I started with a Caesar salad -- a little over garlicky but with extra-good croutons.
Then Sean had the Baked Ziti and I had Tortellini Alfredo -- there was enough food to box some up for lunch.
We finished with some ice cream/gelatto from the Gelatteria attached to the restaurant. I won't say I'm a gelatto expert, but I have been to Italy, and have had good gelatto elsewhere, and this was just disappointing. Mine ice grainy and too sweet, Sean's was just okay.

Anyways overall it was good, inexpensive, and the service is quite friendly. When next in the mood for Italian we'll go back.

Promise Technology Smartstor NS4300N

This is my solution for storage after I returned my Drobo. I purchased my hard drives from Global Computer. With Global you can only exchange defective drives. You may not just return them without paying additional fees. I was able to swap the Western Digital Caviar Drives for Seagate Barracuda 500GB 3gbs SATA drives.

So, since I returned the Drobo, I needed a place to put all those drives. I went searching back through my notes from my initial storage search. At this point, I knew that I wanted an empty enclosure, with a Gigabit port, a print server and at a price between $400-500. I had seen something like what I wanted on the Dell website. However, both the Intel and US Robotics product only supports SATA 150 and the drives I own are SATA-300. It seemed a waste to not have that extra transfer speed.

Along comes a Promise. I found this product with a google search. It looked like something that could be right for me. I had never heard or Promise Technologies, but felt more comfortable after doing some google research. The device met all of my requirements including SATA-300 for the drives.

The is not a product listed on Global Computer's website, but the sales rep that helped with my return said that he could order it. It was about $435.00 with shipping, so it was actually cheaper than my Drobo. I also ordered a Linksys - SD2005 Gibabit switch and a PC Gibabit adapter for my primary desktop.

The device arrived on Monday. I have to admit that the NS4300N was not as easy to install as the Drobo. You have to screw the drives into a carrier (orange things in the picture). I have never liked dealing with tiny hard drive screws. It took about 10 minutes to get the drives out of the bags and into the carriers. It went more quickly after the carriers were done. Just insert the carriers into the NS4300N, connect the ethernet cable from the NAS to the switch and plug in the power.

The NS4300N takes about a minute to wake after pushing the power button located on the front. It cycles through the lights and then gives a loud beep that says it's ready. It noticed that I am still missing one drive which should arrive from Global tomorrow.

The next step is to install the supplied NAS utility onto one of the computers. I think all of this does is initialize the drive and allow you to initially communicate to the SmartStor device. The reason I say that is that, in Windows, you just go the My Network Places and browse to the drive using it's IP address.

The NAS utility seemed to hiccup at first. It was looking for the factory default IP address for the box vs. the one assigned by the router. This was easily changed in the setup utility.

The next step was to open the Promise Advanced Storage Utility. This allows you to do more advanced NAS management. You can setup backups, email event notifications, users, workgroups, etc. I setup the email notifications, Raid 5 and enabled the USB print server. I have an HP 2600N that had been hooked into one of my older desktops and is now hooked directly to the SmartStor.

It's ALOT faster than the Drobo. It took about 3 hours to move over 276GB of data onto the unit. This was almost twice as fast as the Drobo. I don't think this is because of the Gigabit wiring because it was all still coming off a FW800 Drive. I did then same test from the earlier post with 2.5 GB of data from a connected laptop. It took 3 minutes and 20 seconds vs 12 minutes of the same data to the Drobo. So I am happy.

I have a UPS attached to the SmartStor, but I am will be running crash tests over the next few days to see how stable the unit is if the power goes out.

Overall I am happy, or will be after the crash tests, with the unit. It has a great form factor, is quiet and works as I expected. The Promise website says it will only address 3TB vs. 4TB for the Drobo, but I would not be surprised if a firmware update comes out to fix this limitation.

Summer Vacation Part 1

We hardly ever just get away just to get away. So we were planning on visiting Sean's father who has recently moved to Palmyra, and decided to spend a couple of days on our own first.

We were looking for something we could do for a few days before the weekend and decided on Staunton, VA.(Pronounced STAN-TON) We had never been there and the website looked cute.

Our first night in Staunton, we ate at Wright's Dairy-rite . This is a drive-in that has been family-owned since 1952. We are always up for something other than the chains, so we gave it a whirl. Sean ordered the dogzilla. The biggest hot dog we have ever seen. Pretty good stuff here.

After dinner we had malted shakes at Kline's Dairy Bar.

Drobo a No Go

I had recently posted about receiving a new Drobo storage unit. I was really excited about the potential of this product. The ability to easily upgrade to larger drives as they got cheaper, plus the easy installation were great selling points. It really was as easy setup to open the box, open the drives, plug the drive into the unit, plug in everything and the software CD. All good for Drobo. Or so I thought

One of my drives arrived DOA. I am fairly comfortable with this because I heard a clunking sound when the drive spun up. So I sent it back to Gobal Computer. This was Friday and the drive left the same day I got the RA number. I have NEVER had a hard drive fail in my 24 odd years of owning computers (god I am getting old). This left me feeling pretty comfortable about using Drobo with the remaining three drives. So on Friday night I started moving Data over onto the Drobo.

The first data test was a speed run. I use a 10/100 network via a Linksys wireless router. I tried moving 2.5GB from a laptop downstairs to the Drobo. No fancy speed meter here, just watched the clock. 2.5GB took 14 minutes from one of my laptops to the Drobo. Jason had posted that he was interested in seeing the transfer rates. So I took the same amount of data and transfered it to an external FW800 drive I had connected to the same desktop. That transfer took 7 minutes. So the Drobo, as expected, was no speed demon,

On Saturday night, I started moving more data over to the Drobo. I started with some Norton backups of last years business data. This was a 178 GB volume that I had planned on moving to the Drobo and then decompressing it onto the device. Windows said this was going to take 340 minutes. Eeek almost 6 hours. Ok, it's a lot of data and Drobo is only a USB connection. At least is was just crossing over the motherboard of the desktop and not the network.

About 2 hours into the transfer Drobo started acting funny. About every ten minutes, the Drobo Dashboard started blinking that "I am protecting your data" and the lights on drobo flashed back and forth between red and green. It would go through it's data protection sequence for about 8 minutes and everything would be back to normal. It did this three times, then told me that drive three had failed. At this point drobo says it cannot protect me against a further drive failure and goes into a rebuilding cycle to distribute the data over the two remaining drives. This took about 22 hours.

Ok, I'm thinking that this must be a bad batch of drives. I went to Drobospace and did some research and found that Drobo failing drives is not unusual. This led me to take the bad drive out and install it in my another desktop with a free SATA connection. Sure enough, Windows saw the drive and was able to partition and format it. I was able to replicate this again in an external enclosure. So now I have a good drive, but Drobo will not see it.

This left me with an overall bad feeling about the Drobo. The bad part about this is that Global (I got help from them later) only allows exchanges for DEFECTIVE items. Well the drive is not defective, it works fine. Drobo just cannot use it. So out 120 bucks plus not feeling too comfortable about the Drobo unit.

On Monday, as suggested by one of the forum mods on Drobospace, I called Drobo tech support. I have to say that it was very nice that I could get on the phone with them in about 15 minutes. I was not impressed with the guy I ended up talking with on that call. He gave me an email address and told me to send me the diagnostics report. Now, the Drobo Dashboard does not have a report link. I told the tech this and it took him 5 minutes to figure out that you have to access this from the Windows system tray. I should have thought of it myself and was very disappointed that the guy Drobo puts on the phone doesn't know his hardware.

I was planning on using this unit too store my business data. As a photographer, my digital files are my life. This experience left me cold enough about the unit that I called Global Computer to see about sending it back. After some initial run around, I got in touch with Todd who worked pretty well with me. He was able to order a product for me that was not on Global's website, and let me return all of the drives and replace them with Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives. In a world of everything online, it was nice talking to someone who knew their product and was able to access products not readily available to the public. Todd is at (888) 445-2725 ext. 1590 and I highly recommend talking to him if you are going to order something.

Anyway, now I had a Promise Technology NS4300N and four 500GB drives for basically the same prices as the Drobo with drives.

For the home user the Drobo may be ok, but I would go with one of the readily available, proven, NAS products.

I will post more on the promise tomorrow.

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.

Coming Soon

Pedigree Ice Cream Sandwich

Marlene and I were at the local Harris Teeter yesterday to pick up some ice cream and saw this in the novelty ice cream freezer.

Not the best picture, because it was shot with my cell phone, but this is a photograph of ice cream sandwiches for DOGS!!. Who would have thunk.