Craig Mayhew’s Blog

I’ve owned a drobo for 3 months now and so I thought I’d share my experience with this pioneering device.

Day 1:

For those of you that aren’t familiar with drobo; It is a device for keeping your data safe from corruption and drive failure. It plugs in via usb (or more recently ethernet) and merges all the drives you put into it into a large pool of protected storage (only ever insert empty drives in drobo becuase it automatically wipes data from drives when you plug them in for the first time). For me this consisted of a 200GB, a 250GB and a 500GB drive to start with. This gave me 417GB of protected storage.

Setting up the drobo was easy. It was quick and painless. My probems began when I ordered two new 500GB drives. They arrived, I slotted one into drobo, the space immediately became available. The other I was keeping as a spare for if a drive fails in the future. This now gave me 882GB of protected storage. I transferred data from my previous storage mediums (a mixture of hard disks and dvds) and once done shut down my computer for the evening. All seemed well, I could finelly sleep at night knowing that a failed drive or dead disk sectors wouldn’t haunt my nightmares any longer.

Day 2:

After a good nights sleep I woke up and switched on my computer to be greeted by a red light. The 500GB drive had failed. That’ okay though because drobo spent the next 8 hours making sure my data was protected across the remaining 3 disks. After it had done this I plugged in the spare 500GB drive and cast the “dead” drive aside. Drobo sorted itself and all went back to normal with the data protected across all four drives. I turned my computer off and I went to sleep but couldn’t help wondering why drobo had failed a brand new drive. I told myself it must have just been dodgy out of the box.

Day 3:

I woke up the next morning to find that when I powered on my pc drobo had failed the other new 500GB drive. I started to get a little worried at this point as I was fresh out of spare drives. I logged onto the drobo support site contacted support.

Day 4:

I got a reply asking for me to submit my diagnostics file. This file is encrypted so I could be handing over any information about anything that is on my computer or stored on my drobo and I wouldn;t even know. I wasn;t particulary happy about this but realised I had little choice if I wanted to find out why my drobo was eating drives.

Day 5:

I had a reply telling me that because of Samsung 500GB (HD501LJ) not sticking to the rules when communicating via sata when they are powered on, drobo would think they were malfunctioning and fail them. This should be fixed in the next firmware release.

Weeks Later:

The new firmware release fixed the problem and I’m now using the 500GB drives quite happily. The whole experience left me quite shaken and not so trusting in the drobo. If I had plugged in both the 500GB drives at the same time then drobo would have failed them both when it next turned on. This would have completely wiped out my data as drobo doesn’t support multiple drive failures.

The lesson:

If your replacing drobo drives. Only ever replace them one at a time and do a complete shut down and reboot test to make sure the new drives are compatible. I’ve also found that the drobo can be very very slow at writing data and really doesn’t like reading and writing at the same time. The drobo is a great product but I think we need to wait for the drobo 2.

Good Points:

• Stress free & simple protected storage
• Can mirror data where there is free space to do so to provide extra redundency in case of two drive failures (This is an unconfirmed rumour, if anyone could shed some light on this I would be very grateful)
• Ability to upgrade capacity on the fly.

Bad Points:

• Can be really really slow at writing data to the drobo. I’ve exprienced speeds as slow as 2mb/s for periods of over an hour. This was very very frustrating and I assume it’s down to the procesor within the drobo not being able to keep up.
• Only a 1 year warranty offered by data robotics. This makes me a bit nervous as it is common for a good product to have a 3 year warranty and a high end product to have a 5 year warranty. Do you want to spend £250 on a drobo every 12months? I know I don’t!

I’m in france at the moment and took the time to visit Oradour with some friends. It is a town that was massacred by German forces in 1944 and has been left exactly as it was when the massacre occurred. Pretty grim place to be honest… lots of family graves (it was the family graves that got me). For anyone who doesn’t get a chance to go around it I’ve attached several videos to this blog entry.

Video (mp4) – Names of people killed in 1944 Oradour massacre

Video (mp4) – Oradour family graves 1

Video (mp4) – Oradour family graves 2

Video (mp4) – Oradour family graves 3

Video (mp4) – Oradour family graves 4

About a year ago I got my hands on a PS3 for the sole purpose of running folding@home. When people discovered I had a PS3 with no games they thought me slightly mad. When I explained to them it was just for running folding@home I was greeted by blank faces and questions such as “what the hell is that?”. Hopefully a few people will read this post and find out a bit more about f@h and how it could help research into new drugs and therapies that will save lives.

What is folding@home?

Folding@Home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. People donate a their unused processing power from their home/work computers. It’s as simple as downloading a piece of software from the folding@home website and then leaving it to run in the background. It was launched on October 1, 2000, and is currently managed within Stanford University’s chemistry department, under the supervision of Professor Vijay Pande. Folding@Home is the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world. The goal of the project is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.” In short it’s trying to better understand and hopefully lead to cures for sickle-cell disease (drepanocytosis), Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, BSE (mad cow disease), cancer, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, osteogenesis imperfecta, alpha 1-antitrypsin deficiency, and other aggregation-related diseases.

Why should I help?

Because people die from cancer and other aggregation-related diseases every single minute. Or if your just after the feel good factor of saying “look I’ve donated” then you get a score that keeps tally of how much processing power you have donated. This is visible on the scoreboard here.

Where do I get it?

If you want to install it on a desktop computer then it’s available here. If you own a PS3 then all you need to do is hook it up to the internet, download the latest updates and then goto the f@h icon (under the network icon) to leave it running. Unfortunately it isn’t possible to run f@h in the background on a PS3. If your quite tech savvy then it’s even possible to download and run f@h for your ati graphics card.

What have you done Craig?

At the time of writing this I’m in 5 881st position out of the 957 729 people that have donated. With my total score being 423 287. Here’s a link to my f@h profile and my teams profile.

They also give you a certificate to display in your office :)

After doing some searching I’ve found there are a number of other Craig Mayhew’s out there. If your one of them then please leave a comment and introduce yourself! If you’ve got a site that you would like me to direct people to then I’ll put a link on my home page so people can find you easily.

I’ve found a few people named Craig Mayhew already. Here’s the list:

Nasa – Craig Mayhew

Broadcaster/Producer – Craig Mayhew