ahh christmas. the time for forgiving. forgetting, drinking, petty bickering, animosities brought to a head, burying the hatchet into family members. dismembering the bodies and wrapping the parts in old tinsel and chickenwire and dumping them in a deep mineshaft somewhere in the middle of australia where GPS fears to track. Hmm, there’s some new profiteering right there, see, they dont put that on the tourist pamphlets: places to bury a body. it would probably be the general kick in our economic downturned pants, sophistry notwithstanding.

so, yep. it’s that time of year again. let the elf-medication begin.

One of my Desktop’s 500gb drives stopped working, with it being the one drive in your system that has all the backups of your photos and music, books, drivers, apps, games, etc. was the drive i started my PC with really. and it’s a western digital, so anyone i ask will either be surprised, or not that surprised it’s a western digital.

i’m still in the ‘Why God Why’ camp of ritualistic failure prevention strategies, and have not yet graduated beyond that stage, as with all rituals, you find something that works until it fails and you still end up going back to it. 

and, it really failed. a complete dud. it doesn’t even spin up, and the freezer trick, does nothing. i could replace the PCB with another WD5000AAKS, but it’s only a year or two old, feb 2007, and i don’t want to destroy 2 drives, well, one temporarily . it’s still pissing me off when i look at it. grr.

So to remedy, i bought a $100 Samsung 640gb drive from Jantech, got home, moved some drive letters around, and decided to go from 5 drives to 4 drives, with the E for external (and M for my macbook pro, S for the NAS server, T for TV shares, U for iTunes, V for video, etc. sounds childish when you spell it out)

The other frustrating thing is, and probably the most annoying overall, my Microsoft Habu Mouse (it’s a razer in a microsoft branded shell) , is for an ungodly reason, turning itself off and on while i’m using it, and it’s doing double and triple clicks instead of one click. I know it’s disconnecting, , because it makes the connect/disconnect noise in Vista, so i know it’s “broken”, i just can’t tell why. replacing the drivers is not helping, and it’s very recent, i.e. after last weeks patching blitz from microsoft. 

There’s very likely a log of the hardware events somewhere in vista, but i can’t deign where or why microsoft would hide hardware failures in some pokey little backwards fashion… yeah, i can’t see anything in the hardware filter of the event viewer’s logs, and it’s insane stuff like this that gets under your skin, ’specially having to literally ‘tab’ in the new enhanced event viewer when the mouse stops working for 12-15 seconds, every 10-20 seconds.

 i have no choice but to blame microsoft, but that’s only good to a point, usually the point where you realise, with ‘kratos-like’ patience, that chasing the issue is like chasing a mountain. you get there and … nothing. stabbing the mountain in the eyeball with a spoon might be a bit overdone, but it doesn’t help.

i suppose it’s a learning experience i.e. avoid microsoft, and it’s a dubious way to bolster logitech’s bottom line this christmas. maybe it’s a loose wire or a fused switch or something ‘at fault’  but it’s been perfect up till now, ans maybe it’s not software, perhaps whatever caused issue #1 caused issue #2 ? maybe.

and just maybe, it’s time.

It’s good to have space. but there always comes a time when you run out of it. especially if you have the internet, or children, or a life. etc. there’s always something to fill that void, and while that’s all very zen, it’s also leading to a dilemma of mine.

I’m running out of space and it’s becoming more expensive than i’d like to fix it. I Don’t have the heart, or the time to trash things, so i keep it around, bookshelves, CD’s, DVD racks, etc. are filled with the iconography of thousands of varied influences on my life. but on my PC, it’s less organised.

last year, i fixed this by getting a NAS to help sort and organise things. But, if i was recommending NAS to a new user, it would be a dilemma. 

Do you need NAS ? do you have a penchant for a neat/empty PC Desktop, like the LaCie and the typical sterile lines of archive/storage boxes, or have a need for a few terabytes of reliable storage ? if all of the above, NAS makes things organised if you’re in the need for organising your storage options and want something a bit different, (and tucked away, my NAS sits right next to the ADSL router on top of a bookshelf)

I, on the other hand, have a lot of content. a Lot. i don’t quite need it, it just accumulates. It’s a terrible habit for IT professionals and home users, and it perpetuates the storage industry. It’s a problem, i’ll admit that. it’s a problem that requires a few terabytes than i have. 

(and perhaps some kind of decent indexing to find things)

For me, it’s also an easy way to dump all the old CD and DVDs into a better place. i.e. the recycling bins. or even donated for those trashy recycled clocks as last-minute christmas gifts sold at the sunday markets. hmm. anyway… here’s an example, as most people don’t chew through gigabytes in a year, let alone a week or an hour.

Currently, i’ve moved into saving 720p quality television shows (due to the purchase of  my 46″ Bravia and complimentary if not timely PS3 that comes with it as lat year’s christmas gift),  my current streaming folder has 200gb of TV shows from the last 6 months (there’s just some really good shows there at about 1gb each).

while that’s great in one sense, archiving 200gb cheaply either falls into DVD’s or HDD’s.

A box of 50 blank DVD’s would do the job but it really takes about 4 days, i.e. 10 mins per disc, 5 discs per hour, 20 discs before i get sick of it, leave it for another day, etc. I’ve done it before. While sizeme + imgburn is great for doing this, there’s very little to reduce the tedium of inserting and labelling DVD’s. Then comes the  fun part, stacking and retrieveing content a few months later. or years later.

As far as external HDD’s, it becomes tedious to have to buy more than one drive, or have to transfer files from one external to another to organise things. i’ve got 3 or 4 bare drives so far, 5 in my PC at the moment, plus i have 3 external drives of varying sizes, all just on my desk. so i know it’s not an ideal solution for archiving content, or reselling/upgrading, as who needs 200gb or 320gb drives when a 500gb or 1000gb drive is going to be a $50 difference with a decent warranty.

There are people who have more drives than i do, just hanging around as paperweights or ghetto speakers, etc. they don’t survive well in the modern IT cycle.

While putting aside a rapidly increasing stack of identical or somewhat similar 500gb HDD’s on a bookshelf does work, but do i really want to be buying a new HDD every 6 months and trying to figure out which drive has my old camera pictures on it, or just where things are once i disconnect the drives ? 

 There’s no compelling idea that comes to mind, it’s probably cheaper to stack 4 or 5 Western Digital My Book Premium 500 GB’s besides each other, plug them into each other using firewire or a USB2 hub, and cross two or three fingers together that nothing goes wrong with them, as all that data is just gone when things … break. After a while, one should have about 10 or 12 that you can use instead of room lighting, or room heating, etc. 

I should illustrate this a bit for those who don’t know what NAS is or was abruptly brought here through fate or google (*either applies), NAS is something very very simple. it’s a networked PC that shares files.

When it’s set up and works, you just see it as a drive letter on your PC, with a few terabytes of free space. that’s it. It’s also considerably slower than an external HDD in practical use, but a 2-drive system or a 3/4/5 drive system offers the advantage of RAID or iSCSI setups for inherent reliability, idling and power usage in the new terabyte drives means they are cooler over time, making the whole deal quieter and cheaper on your electric bills.

As an example,  I bought the Thecus N2100 a long while ago (mid 2007) from auspcmarket, (Dan @ Dansdata reviews the series pretty well), and while $900 was still fairly … horrendous for a terabyte of storage in 2007, it worked quite well for backups, and the viable range of linux server apps that were ported for the Thecus, were easily found on the unofficial Thecus Wiki, which has a rabid fanbase of people to upload and update modules for apps/modules like avahi and Firefly for iTunes streaming, and also the Roku SoundBridge Radio’s. The logitech Squeezebox Boom’s are also (kind of) supported with Slimserver, IIRC the chumby should also have slimserver support, but that’s really for those ppl who have more money than i do.

Compared to a pure 2-drive enclosure (e.g. Drobo or an Icy Box) or a proper standalone  NAS 2-drive (i.e. the great, middle-ground D-Link DNS-323 or the
Thecus N299) or an external eSATA HDD enclosure which works at 20-30mb/sec,  it’s really a question of network performance, reliability and cost after that.

I truly found the benchmarks at SmallNetBuilder was an invaluable reference, along with the local Shopbot pages for comparing prices and local popularity, as well as the individual reviews. the real decider for me was finding the community of users who were hacking their NAS machines to run different server apps, to run BT or NZB downloaders, slimserver and itunes servers, media sharing services, that actually worked compared to the dinky services that often failed with AVI serving or loading hundreds or thousands of image thumbnails, etc. 

however, $250 for a mini-PC that runs a few apps, but has 2 HDD’s is relatively easy to get your head around to start, but it’s really, really limited. Most won’t run a web server, those that do, often run linux, and there the fun begins for the technically minded, getting a $400 hard drive container to behave like it’s a PC and not an appliance. 

Perhaps the dividing reason you would choose a NAS over an external HDD is for sharing between more than 2 devices, i.e. a Media Player, a Laptop, a desktop or two, etc. If you only have one PC, i.e. a laptop, but you don’t use it much, or you take it with you, etc. then a regular external drive is more manageable.

The benefit of a NAS for Media Sharing is kind of obvious, it means you don’t have to be near your PC to hear music, or have an ipod/phone dock to listen to your digital music library. If you have a Xbox360 or a PS3 (like i do), moving files from one place to another i.e burning to DVD’s or USB flash drives, can be a chore just to watch a movie or sync some music. You could just install a server app on your PC to stream media, most people do, but a NAS will work without your PC being on or involved, which can be liberating for some, having a storage area for all your music, or all your movies, photos, documents, etc. that you can’t lose when you format your PC can be a good reason alone just to have a NAS around. or you could have just run out of space on your Laptop or desktop and want some security.

Just keeping a shared folder/network drives for music and video files helps keep things organised, and also secure if a PC crashes or you have your laptop stolen or PC turned off, etc. If you use squeezebox music players, you can keep the server and music files on the same NAS, and use the wireless network to listen to music of your own choice without a PC anywhere near it. which is great for an outdoors entertaining area or a party/DJ area. That sort of thing.

I don’t have one personally, $200 for a wireless music player, versus an ipod, might be contentious in your universe. but it’s fun. a slimserver makes a kind of sense, since you don’t need to open itunes to play music, it’s a kind of renaissance back to the days of old-fashioned music without having to use a computer or a screen to select songs, but also not having to flip through CD covers, losing or misplacing the CD, putting the CD back into the wrong case, ripping CD’s into your PC just to play a CD, etc. devils advocate - an airport express is a cheaper wireless music player, but it needs iTunes to work and you’re still tethered to a PC for playing music from, even if you use your iPhone to remote control your airport express via wifi.

As for my original dilemma, i think i’ll trade in my Thecus N2100 and a few spare HDD’s in for the Dlink DNS343 next year, as the OLED display has some hack-potential, and i do need ~3tb with RAID5 to help move stuff off my PC and into a generally safer space. I’m holding off since it’s gonna cost $600 + $600 (or more if it’s sold preinstalled). I did consider the drobo as a way to store the files from my macbook pro, but the WD 400GB My Passport Studio Turbo with firewire 800 seems to be a better bet for backing up my macbook pro with time machine and it’s only ~$300 with firewire 800, so i won’t be too damned transferring between USB to USB on the laptop for everyday things.

It’s  just … well, it sounds better than spending time  at the computer, baking in the summer heat (was 17′c and raining yesterday, now 25′c and sunny) and the occasional breeze off the headlands.

Or listening to the more frequent drunken reveller making their way home up the hill past where i live. Cowboy Bebop’s playing on the TV behind me (queued up on the foxtel iQ), so i’m multi-basking, the glow of the LCD from behind and in front of me. all v. lazy.

Let’s see, i spent most of yesterday sleeping in, reading the paper, checking email, watching TV, going out for shopping (non constructive), and then looking at better storage options for clearing up my desk of all the random DVD’s i’ve got strewn all around my desk & bookshelves. i’m sure i did more, but that seems to be pretty fulfilling right there.

Instead of doing legwork for nothing, i just put together an article on some basic NAS options for people to look at their options.
(I might still dress it up before posting it online, but it seems considered. informative. Rambling.*shrug*)

What else, added a stack of generic “prettifying” plugins for wordpress 2.7, the only one i wanted to get working is the WoW achievements widget, which seems to be pretty good. but i can’t seem to configure it (i have the feeling the setting tab isn’t 2.7 compatible, but the saved settings are carried over through the upgrade from 2.5/2.6). More intriguingly, it’s got the wrong readme.txt file in the archive, so the Wordpress.com plugin entry has the wrong title i.e. “Add to Any Subscribe Button”, linking from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/world-of-warcraft-recent-achievements. While Lady Jess got her blog working (looks very good BTW), i’ll just hold off, it’s rather incidental for me.

As for Warcraft, i think my last decent achievement was getting “I’ve toured the Fjord” . So, post-guild collapse, i’ve been slacking in getting ahead. Though, memorably, i think i’ve seen Thrall get taken down 4 times since the lvl 80’s have been storming Orgrimmar for the achievements. Usually when i’m on, i usually spend more time trying to make money from DE’ing greens for infinite dust and Great Planar Essences, which is not ideal, but i do have 70+ dream shards by now instead of a lvl 80 warlock, or a lvl 60+ death knight.

Perhaps i’ll join the new rehashed guild AWAKEN if i get an invite, but i just recall spending so much time running around in circles before the achievements doing pointless things for guildies, but there’s really plenty of time to ding 77 and save up the 6k in gold for the dalaran flying mount or a netherdrake mount or pugging for achievement titles. Plus, with the levelling guides on hand (Zygor’s), it’s a bit like cheating. but not enough to feel any kind of guilt or remorse, i’m seeing a lot more of the game this way and doing other things without it really taking over.

i do like the plugin for flickr, if you’ve got barely any interest,  you can have a look at my old photos if you’d like.

i’ve installed a few plugins, but haven’t tuned or updated the widgets or plugins so far, it’s really just another update frenzy, but far more sedate and affecting less people overall than the last one i was subjected to.