Personal

My brother starts a blog about bicycle racing at 40 years old!

My brother, Bobby, just got a cat 4 racing license and is racing again as a 41 year old :) His blog will document his progress. We both had cat 2 licenses (Senior B at the time) when we were 20ish. He just bought a new bike, a Colnago Extreme with Mavic Carbon wheels, 16.5lbs, very, very nice bike.

Read all about it here.

Matrox TripleHead2Go and a Dynex 32" TV problems

I bought a matrox triplehead2go so I can use 3 monitors with iRacing, my racing simulator. The triplehead2go splits a single video signal in to 3 monitors. The computers thinks it's displaying 3840 x 1024 and each monitor does 1280 x 1024, a left, middle and right hand monitor. This gives you a pretty cool surround video field when playing 3D games like iRacing. I can see the track in front on the middle monitor and then the left and right hand views are rendered in the other monitors.

I've used a 47" LG LCD display (1080p) with HDMI and that worked and my Dynex 32" LCD with HDMI works also (720p). Once I plugged in the triplehead2go then my Dynex doesn't detect a signal anymore. The same cable to the LG works fine and to a 23" Dell screen. So, it looks like the Dynex won't work with the triplehead2go at all. I'm thinking the Triplehead2go is pushing a 1280x1024 signal to each port and the Dynex won't accept it because it's a 720p set.

So, I'm not sure what to do now. I could buy 3 x 23" monitors but they look very small after playing with even a single 32" screen. Two more 47" 1080p sets is an option. Three 32" 1080p sets is another option. Not sure what to do yet.

Reset WD Caviar IDLE3 timers to stop premature death

I've had two WD 2TB Caviar green drives fail in my Drobo. This happened on pretty new drives after only a couple of months usage. Googling the internet shows I'm not alone and the culprit seems to be the power saving features on the drive. The idle3 timer causes the drive to park the head after 8 seconds of idle time. On a RAID setup, it seems that this causes the drive to do this many times per day and as a result, they seem to fail because they park much too often and the drive dies prematurely as a result.

I downloaded a WD utility called WDIDLE3 which when you boot from DOS, allows you to see what the current IDLE3 setting is as well as change or disable it. All my WD Caviar green drives (I've looked at 6 tonight) were set to 8 seconds. I could disable the timer on my two 1TB drives. The 2TB and 1.5TB drives I could only set the timer to 62 minutes. The "WDIDLE3 /D" command does this.

Whether this really makes a difference to the drives reliability time will tell but this is the conventional wisdom right now.

Adding a drive to Drobo required reboot

This was strange. WD shipped me two new WD 2TB green drives to replace the two that failed. The drives worked fine and I could use them with my ThermalTake Blacx external USB drive. But, the Drobo didn't notice them when I inserted them in my spare Drobo slot, #4. I asked on the DroboSpace forums and they suggested rebooting the Drobo. After a reboot, the Drobo detects the drive and adds it in to the array. Very strange. Clearly, there must be another firmware revision coming along because it should detect the drive immediately. I'm currently on the latest and greatest. Firmware 1.3.6 and 1.3.8 dashboard.

I'm using the Drobo now as a pure timemachine drive only, it's too slow for any thing else. I was using a sparse bundle to hold my time machine backups on it but then the timemachine GUI doesn't show any history despite all the files being there. I just used the whole drive as the backup now and this avoids the history issue but the time machine volume will grow without bounds now.

Recovering from Drobo failure

So,

Bottom line is I lost the data on the Drobo. I pulled the bay 4 drive (WD 2TB caviar green) and RMAed it. I RESET the Drobo which puts it back to factory default state with 3 drives in it, 1TB, 1.5TB and a 2TB, all WD caviar green. I created a 16TB single volume and I'm using it for time machine only.

I made extra copies of my digital media regardless so thats all covered. I'm looking around now for a QNAP 419 or 459. Enough.

Advance RMA for second 2TB WD Caviar Green drive

I just did the advance RMA for my other failing WD drive just now. 5 minute wait and no hassles on the phone so pretty easy. The charge they hold on your credit card is pretty stiff though 297US so make sure you send back the broken drive :)

Drobo wont mount today, the pain continues...

Woke up this morning and no Drobo drive on my iMac. It was working yesterday. The Drobo is all green, it's still attached with USB, the Drobo dashboard mac application sees it and everything is green, the disk utility sees it but it won't mount. I noticed there was a new firmware level, 1.3.6 so I upgraded it to that but same result. I've rebooted the Drobo (firmware upgrade and yes, the dashboard says it's applied), rebooting the iMac did nothing either.

The USB light on the Drobo is flickering like crazy so something is going on, I'm guessing there is a major check disk happening which is worrying seeing as it's a journaled file system on the Drobo. I opened a support ticket so we'll see but I can't believe my luck with this thing lately. It's just one thing after another.

This may be the last straw for me. I'm leaving on a trip today so I'm sure Drobo support will close my ticket as solved during the week while I'm away. What a PITA...

I'm running Verify Disk in Disk Utility now and there are lots of "Missing thread record (id=???)" messages while checking the catalog. Not looking good. "Incorrect number of thread records" is also there a couple of times.

I'm running Repair disk now, lots of issues. Not looking good. Looks like some kind of media failure last night but Drobo didn't notice the media failure, no messages, no emails, nothing was critical. Pretty poor showing by the looks of things. Repair disk couldn't repair the disk.

Now trying latest DiskWarrior. It's reporting disk malfunctions. 7 by now. Not looking good either. DiskWarrior just completed saying the volume is unrepairable so thats pretty much it. It's toast.