November was a busy month on the Quest, not all of it stuff I would have wanted to do or expected, but it’s turning out OK. That's not a recent picture, but we did have our first dusting of snow this month. I’ve completed a couple of system builds. There was my new home server (more on that later). I’ discussed the CPU and motherboard I picked for the build, but my PC upgrades turned into a complete system build as everything was replaced except for the Velociraptor drive. But even that was demoted as my system drive. Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #36: Year End Edition
This site has been silent for a couple of weeks so I figured I’d end the year with a Trail Log. I’ve been considering an expansion of the OS Quest data center and finally pulled the trigger with Newegg’s Year End Sale and placed an order on Saturday. I’ll wait for the stuff to arrive before I get into the details since it should be fodder for a few posts. Included are parts for two system builds and some network upgrades. Between the holiday and the fact that I like [...] Read the rest »
Drobo Wrap-Up
It’s time to wrap-up my Drobo thoughts and observations after having my Drobo for a couple of months. I first wrote about the Drobo at the end of August. At that time I was seeing erratic performance and was less than enthused about the Drobo. Then at the end of September there was a new Drobo firmware update and I saw better and more consistent performance. (At least for awhile – more on that later). So now it’s time to wrap this up as much as possible. I’ll start of [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #35: Vacation Edition
This Trail Log comes as I’m wrapping up a perfect two week vacation. Now I know “staycations” are all the rage due to the economy and gas prices, but to me there’s no better vacation than staying home and deciding what to do when I wake up in the morning (or afternoon, or evening). The weather was great which allowed me to spend a lot of time on the patio with my laptop and a beer. Naturally a significant part of my time was spent on the quest so I’ll [...] Read the rest »
Attack of The Hard Drives Redux
While the mess of hard drives has been cleaned up on my desk my hard drive addiction has only grown worse. I currently have one 1.5TB drive, nine 1TB drives, eight 500GB drives, a 160GB drive and a 320GB drive that I consider “in use”. My iMac has an internal 500GB drive along with my 500GB Western Digital My Book and my Drobo with three 1TB drives in it. Because of my initial performance problems with the Drobo it’s still pretty lite on files and used only for backups. This [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #34: Week in Review
It’s been a couple of weeks since the last trail log so I figured I’d take this time to update some recent posts. My Windows Home Server fiasco is over. I did lose a couple of old movie files. They were old files that I had originally done for testing and pre-dated my backup regimen so they probably vanished long ago. The Windows Home Server is running fine with the external USB enclosure for two of it’s drives. I’ll have to send the eSATA enclosure back soon but I’m actually [...] Read the rest »
Drobo Firmware 1.2.4 Released
I’d recently written about my first impressions of the Drobo FW800 and was less than impressed with it’s performance. A comment from Tom at Drobo mentioned that a software update was pending that would resolve the issues. Tonight that update arrived. It’s method of announcing itself was a bit problematic though. I was playing a podcast from the Drobo and copying some files to it when all of a sudden everything froze and the Drobo rebooted itself. After the reboot the message that a new firmware update was available appeared. [...] Read the rest »
The OS Quest Trail Log #33: Potpourri
It’s been a pretty dry couple of month for blog posts so far. But there’s still a few things worth mentioning and rather than a couple small posts I decided to put them all here to make them easier to ignore. WordPress 2.6.2 was released and I upgraded this site. It’s a security release so considered required although the developer blog indicates it’s mainly a concern if open registration is allowed. I decided to upgrade anyway. I have to admit, I’m getting a a bit lazy with these minor upgrades. [...] Read the rest »
Drobo First Impressions
[Updated Sept 25, 2008: Firmware 1.2.4 was released and has improved performance over what's mentioned here. I write about Firmware 1.2.4 here.] Back in July I mentioned I was getting a Drobo to try and clean up my hard drive mess. I’ve had the Drobo for about a month now but haven’t posted about it because I’m still fighting with it. Overall it works fine but performance has been poor. After tweaking, there’s still a lot of variation in performance which bugs me. Drobo has said that write speeds of [...] Read the rest »
