Personal

Bought Incase slider case

I've been looking for a case for the iPhone for a while. I had a DLO rubber one before but it's too thick and 'sticky' and is hard to put and take it out of my pants pocket. The Incase is a slippier design and doesnt add much thickness. It does cover the bottom so you can't use the 3G universal adapter when docking. I ended up removing the adapter from my clock/radio that I use and it fits fine once you do that and this will work for me I think.

It is expensive at 35 bucks and it has no screen protector. I'm reusing a static cling type one I had on the phone anyway but this would add another 15 bucks if you didn't already have one. The case fits very snugly. The bottom can slide off to allow it to be docked normally but it's super tight. This makes it hard to take off and this is why I decided in the end to just take the universal adapter out of my clock radio rather than sliding the bottom off and on.

Overall, this feels like it should be 20 bucks with a screen protector but I couldn't find something like that at the store.

iPhoto 09, iMovie 09 and Drobo

I moved my iMovie events and photo library to the Drobo and so far it seems fine. I have like 16k photos and was able to tag maybe 3/4k the first day. Speed seems fine. It's not snap fast but it's fast enough. My HD iMovies are editable and play just fine in iMovie 09. My movies are 1920x1080 captured with a Canon HF100 HD camcorder and work just fine.

Video with Drobo

I moved my iPhoto and iMovie libraries on to the Drobo and for me it's fine. I can play HD movies in iMovie with no stalling at all. My video is captured with a Canon HF100 (17mbps 1920x1024) and it plays just fine in iMovie with the video on the Drobo.

20MB/sec copying iMove Events to Drobo

I'm copying about 130Gb of video files from the internal drive to the Drobo. So far, it's showing about 20MB/sec while doing it, basically copying large files.

Again, anybody worried about firewire versus USB 2.0, read this post again, the cable type is not the issue with this thing. I don't have a first generation Drobo to benchmark but unless the controller processor got faster, firewire support is just a yawner on this thing.

UPDATE: It's pretty erratic. Just now, it jumped to 31MB/sec but it's wandering around between 12MB/sec and about 34MB/sec.

Survived first week with the Drobo

The first week has ended and it's still working. It currently has 2 x WD 1TB drives and a WD 750GB drive. Seagate 1.5Tb drives have been returned and the Drobo was upgraded to the 1.3 firmware. I'm using timetamer now to limit the size of timemachine backups to 2x the source drive size or around 540Gb for me. I'm hosting my iPhoto and shared iTunes library on it and performance wise have no issues.
So far, so good. The only things to mention in criticism is streaming performance is poor, Drobo takes about 2 days to respond to a new case but once it's open they respond in under an hour typically. Firewire 800 versus USB isn't really an issue with this as far as I can tell. I started with FW800, switched to USB and currently it's back in FW purely to free up a USB port on my hub. Drobo repair when you replace a drive etc takes a LONG time, probably too long. I can't see anyone being comfortable waiting 18 hours for a rebuilt and I only had 650Gb of data on it.
When the third generation unit arrives then I'd like to see performance approaching conventional RAID systems when all drives are the same model and I'd like to see repair times cut to under 2 hours. I'd pay a hundred bucks more for one if they did this. The ability to host two partitions or LUNs and then access each partition from one computer at a time would be cool also. This would let me share it to backup my laptop without having to unplug it.
Overall, it's been a long week with the teething problems but I'm happy now. Lets just hope it doesn't fail.

TimeTamer on Drobo or anything for that matter

A drobo support rep put me on to this. TimeTamer is a utility script that works on any drive including Drobo. Timemachine usually keeps backing up until the drive is full and then starts purging old backups to keep room for new stuff. This is a problem on a Drobo because you'll end up with a full drive of Timemachine backups. It'd be nice if there was a way to limit Timemachine to X Gb and now there is with TimeTamer. It only works on a drive with no timemachine backup on it so rename your existing one before starting. Run the script, pick the drive you want and then Timemachine is limited to 2x the size of the drive you're backing up. It works by creating a sparse bundle on the disk with a special name that Timemachine will spot and then mount as a file system. The sparse bundle is limited to 2x and presto, Timemachine backs up to the sparse bundle and we have what we want. It should work on any drive.

Backup speed wise there wasn't much difference, I was getting around 45MB/sec peaks while doing it so it wasn't bad at all. Deleting the old backup directory took forever (2m+ files). Someone needs to make a way to remove large folders efficiently.

Drobo 2nd generation XBench test

Pretty slow at the end of the day. Anybody who complains about USB versus FW with this thing is completely missing the point that the issue is their controller is just plain slow. The problem isn't the bus type attaching it to the host computer.

USB 2.0 scores a 20.30, FW800 scores a 25.74 and the internal 2.5" disk on my iMac scores a 75. It's usable but the bottom line is a laptop quality drive is about 3x faster according to XBench. This measures MB/sec, I don't see IOs/sec etc so it's hardly a super detailed test but it is what it is.

Results:

Drobo USB 2.0 via Hub

Results 20.30

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)

Physical RAM 4096 MB

Model iMac7,1

Drive Type TRUSTED Mass Storage

Disk Test 20.30

Sequential 19.74

Uncached Write 22.33 13.71 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 24.19 13.69 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 11.97 3.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 30.35 15.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 20.89

Uncached Write 9.21 0.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 39.40 12.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 59.06 0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 24.64 4.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Drobo attached using FW800

Results 25.74

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)

Physical RAM 4096 MB

Model iMac7,1

Drive Type TRUSTED Mass Storage

Disk Test 25.74

Sequential 21.46

Uncached Write 39.95 24.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 35.87 20.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 8.88 2.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 48.03 24.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 32.16

Uncached Write 22.64 2.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 26.34 8.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 53.32 0.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 42.60 7.90 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Internal 300Gb disk on iMac

Results 75.56

System Info

Xbench Version 1.3

System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)

Physical RAM 4096 MB

Model iMac7,1

Drive Type WDC WD3200AAJS-40RYA0

Disk Test 75.56

Sequential 106.26

Uncached Write 114.25 70.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 113.83 64.41 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 94.84 27.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 104.58 52.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 58.63

Uncached Write 23.47 2.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Write 140.59 45.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Uncached Read 90.46 0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]

Uncached Read 134.25 24.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Drobo finally is finished

The whole saga is switching out Seagate 1.5TB drives and replacing them with the WD 1TB drives has ended successfully. All is green again. One hung Drobo in the process but we're back where we started happily minus the one TB of storage I lost because of the drive capacity differences. I have about 986Gb of storage available on it right now and 627Gb used. The last layout started around 3:30pm and I just checked at midnight and it was done so somewhere between 6 and 9 hours for it to complete. Happy enough for now.

Enabled Filevault on the work MacBook today

I have encryption turned on for sensitive stuff anyway but figured may as well turn on the Filevault security. 5 hours to encrypt my user directory. It should be done before I get to work in the morning.

UPDATE: It's morning and it's currently 'Deleting old home folder'. Checking the web, DO NOT INTERRUPT IT, let it finish. This actually ended around lunch time so I figure the whole operation took almost 18 hours before I could use the laptop again. I'm using it again, login is a little sluggish but using it right now, everything seems just fine.

UPDATE: Just used it for a few hours and then tried logging out. Logout now has two phases. Recover lost space which was fast and then backup (I guess timemachine) which took 20 minutes to complete for me. This may be just a one time cost, I'll update again tomorrow. Sleep time is uneffected.

Drobo hung during final relayout, not happy

Just came home and the Drobo dashboard says waiting for connection and my Drobo itself looks very quiet with all lights solid yellow. This doesn't look good. I rebooted the Drobo (cycle power) and it's reattached fine to the iMac and the Dashboard tells me that relayout is continuing, I'm unprotected etc. Data looks good on the Drive. I just grabbed diagnostics and send em off to Drobo support using my existing case so we'll see what they say. 5 hours to go on the rebuild...