Craig Mayhew’s Blog

It’s my last day in Germany today and before coming home I wanted to write about a few things they do (in my opinion) better here than we do in the UK.

Prepay Fuel Stations
On the way into Germany we filled up at a “prepay fuel station” (This was actually in the netherlands and not in Germany) where you have to pay for fuel before you put it into your car. In the UK alot of people are stealing fuel by driving off without paying. The solution most companies have come up with in the UK was to have a number plate recognition computer that black lists a cars number plate if it drives off without paying. This prevents people from stealing twice but doesn’t prevent them from stealing in the first place. Proffesional fuel thieves of course would have a fake number plate and would probably have a barrel in the back of the car so they can steal hundreds of litres of fuel in one go. In any case the prepay would fix all these issues and prevention is better than cure.

Autobahn
The autobahn in many parts doesn’t have a speed limit. It also doesn’t have average speed check cameras in sections that do have speed limits. Despite the ability to drive as fast as you like there are relatively few fatalities on the autobahn. Some environmental groups have said that the higher speeds cause less efficient fuel usage and larger carbon footprints. However introducing a speed limit such as in the UK would mean journey times are longer and therfore cars are on the road for longer which increases congestion. Introducing a speed limit also means it needs to be inforced at additional cost. I personally always see people braking at speed cameras (even the average speed check cameras) we have in the UK which causes a larger carbon foot print. There are some stretches of road in the UK which would benefit from higher or complete removal of the speed limit and it would be good if we could put this to a public vote.

Double decker trains
Trains with two floors! Many parts of the German rail network are designed to have higher trains which are capable of having two floors. This doubles the per carriage capacity. Unfortunately in the UK this would be very expensive to introduce as we have so many bridges and tunnels in our rail network.

The trains are also open plan you can easily walk from one end of a train to other with no doors seperating the carriages. This makes policing a train much easier and increases overall capacity.

Indoor cash machines
Card fruad is a major concern in the UK and this is due to many cash machines being outside. This is convenient as it prevents huge queues with the bank. However from what I have seen many German banks only have cash machines on the inside of the bank. To get into the secure area out of hours you have to swipe a credit or debit card that they accept and it will allow you in. This also means they can easily track who comes in and when.

I’ve noticed a worrying trend. So books are going digital, great! I can supplement my library of books with digital editions that are easier to carry with me everywhere I go and don’t cost the life of a tree. So why charge more for the digital copy than the physical copy? If the paperback industry wants to survive then they are going to need to be smarter than overpricing the ebook editions. For instance, Waterstones charge £1.60 more for the ebook edition of New Moon than the paperback version! This will just force people to pirate digital versions of the book and then the industry will get even less money. A great solution can be taken from the new Star Trek film that comes bundled with a digital version (that can be copied to a smart phone, ipod or similar) when you buy the movie on blu-ray. So why not bundle the ebook version with every paperback copy? The book shop could provide a voucher code with each book where you could log onto a website like www.Meeqi.com and get your digital version of the book for free. Or when you get to the checkout they could simply ask if you would like the digital edition for an additional £2.50. Waterstones would get £2.50 for each voucher they print (which would be £2.49 profit) and the customer would get a fairly priced ebook.

Waterstones charge £1.60 more for the ebook edition of New Moon:
New Moon by Stephenie Meyer costs £5.59 in digital form, but when you buy the paperback version it costs just £3.99. (Prices taken at the time of writing this blog)

From this day forth I see the Drobo as useful as volatile storage when it comes to long term storage of my data.

How it happened:
I unplugged the Drobo from an old computer using the now ancient USB 1.1 and plugged it into my Ubuntu computer. The Ubuntu computer gave a message saying it couldn’t mount the volume. So I plugged it into my laptop to see what Vista had to say, but unfortunately Vista refused to mount the drive as well. After checking the drive in Vista’s disk manager I came to conclusion that Vista saw it as a RAW partition! It had completely forgotten that it was an NTFS partition so Vista didn’t know what to do with it.

My immediate thought was the Drobo is going to start freeing up space and wiping the drives sector by sector. Fortunately I couldn’t hear any disk activity so I thought to myself that I may be able to recover the data. I used a copy of EASUES Data Recovery to do a scan of the hard disk to find lost partitions. It took 48 hours to do the scan, which is ridiculous when you consider I only had 300GB of data on the Drobo and the Drobo’s entire capacity was only 500GB, 48 hours is fairly ridiculous at 1.7Mb/s.

At this point my laptop where I was recovering the data to, crashed. Not a problem as I had my initial scan saved so I could continue where I left off. I wandered off for 2 minutes to come back and find my computer had started a file system scan of the Drobo and it had attempted to repair damaged sectors!! This could be really good or really bad. After windows booted and I franticly continued the scan I ran into another problem! The scan had not remembered where it had stopped so I had to leave it running for a further 48 hours! This time around however I had the mortifying experience of watching the little blue lights go out one at a time on the Drobo’s front panel. It appears that the file system “fix” that vista had run had in fact instructed the Drobo to truncate the “problem” parts of the disk. This consequently meant that I was running the scan for the second time and that this time the Drobo was probably slowly destroying my data. As it turned out the file system scan had destroyed a lot of data but in the end I managed to get a portion of my data back.

Important lessons:

• If you delete something from a drobo, your data is gone… forever.
• If you Drobo file system gets damaged, do not let windows or any other operating system repair it or you will lose some or all of your data.
• The drobo is slow, you can’t recover data in a timely manner (if you can recover it at all).
• Don’t trust the Drobo, as it is only a single device it cannot provide an ultimate solution (or even a reliable one). I will be moving to some kind of distributed private cloud storage setup and will blog about that when I’ve got one going.
• During the time that I have owned the Drobo, it has failed twice. No other disks, flash drives or dvds have died in my house since I bought the drobo. So the Drobo fails more often than any of my other storage devices.

At the PHPUK conference I had the all too brief pleasure of playing with a Microsoft Surface. An application was shown that had virtual balls bouncing around the screen, anything you placed on the table instantly became a physical barriar to the balls and they would bounce of the edge of business cards, paper, poker chips, coins and anything else that was placed on the table.

The table responded just as you’d expect to chucking photos around and  resizing, rotating them but I really can’t see the appeal. I’d much rather look at a very high resolution screen or picture frame when displaying photos rather than look down at a lower resolution table (only 1024×768 pixels!). For games however, If they can bring the price down on these to below £1000 then these could easily compete with or replace board games and group/party orientated consoles like the Nintendo Wii.

Here’s a photo of the surface in action (In use by the two people who were standing next to me).

Unfortunately the frame rate then dropped and the movements got a little jerky until finally the application crashed!

Back to the positives though, this table will be really good when it’s cheaper and I can’t wait to see the applications people develope for it.

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!