Droboshare experiences

This post is basically an email I received from John Sammons following his experiences with the Droboshare. He purchased one as part of the same bundle I did but decided to experiment further. I've not had chance to replicate this on my system but the results he came up with were very interesting. I've reproduced his email in full below with his permission.

Thanks John....

Got the Drobo and am very pleased with it. Interestingly I have found that a bit of time with DroboShare pays dividends in the performance stakes.

I used the HD Benchmark program linked within your blog and found pretty much the same result as you. When I linked the Drobo to the Time Capsule via USB I got slightly improved network share performance but was concerned that the Airport Utility was reporting it as a 256GB drive instead of the current 2TB/16TB drive it should be.

My next test was to download the JumbShare application and configure my MacPro to use Jumbo Frames. This proved to give some improvement in Droboshare but not great when connected to my netgear Gigabit switch, approximately 15% more. Then came a rather outstanding discovery. I was never sure if the Netgear, being a cheap 5 port device, supported all the Gigabit ethernet standards. So I tried connecting both the MacPro and Droboshare to the Timecapsule Gigabit Ethernet as this as my most up to date switch. Wow.... this made a bit of a difference, see below.

I have run the test multiple times and with different file sizes and seem to consistently get between 92MB/s and 102MB/s, thats at least 3 x FW800 performance! Checking the Drobospace forums did not seem to give the impression this was a fast device but the results show otherwise. I also confirmed this with Disk Bench as I was so sure it was a rogue set of results.

My Drobo versions are:

Drobo Firmware: 1.3.0

Droboshare Firmware: 1.1.1

I have also moved the Drobo back and forth to the Droboshare/Direct connect with no problems. The key seems to be putting it in standby first to ensure a save transfer.

I also managed to get my Drobocare uplifted to 2 years which is the EU warranty, I had to exchange several emails with Data Robotics to get them to acknowledge that it should be a 2 year key from 1st May, I don't know if you have done that but its worth it for 2 years piece of mind.

Feel free to blog any of the above if it is of interest to anyone.

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A longer weekend....

OK, OK, so planning going to LA for a three day visit is probably bonkers!

On reflection, I should really extend my stay by a couple of days to make the most out of the trip.

So that's what I've done!

So the revised plan is still to get into LA on the Thursday. By the way, the identity of the podcaster I referred to in my earlier post ("generosity of a certain Mac podcaster") is Allison Sheridan of the Nosillacast podcast. She and her husband Steve, are picking me up from the Airport and letting me stay with them before traveling down to the Star Trek event. I probably would not have gone had it not been for their exceptionally kind offer! Thanks Allison & Steve!

The Star Trek event finishes on the Sunday and I'm hoping to meet up with an old friend who lives in LA, to catch up on old times.

The original plan was then to fly back home on the Sunday night, but the change of plan is that now I'll be flying up to San Francisco on the Sunday evening.

Monday, I'll pick up a hire car and rive out to Cupertino where I'll be lunching with some guys from Apple and having a bit of free time. Nothing planned for Monday evening as yet!

Tuesday morning, I'll drive up to Petaluma and drop in on the TWIT gang and say hello to Leo. It just so happens that "MacBreak Weekly" gets recorded on a Tuesday, so I'll be able to take part, live from the TWIT cottage - how cool is that! Thanks to Mr Laporte for letting me crash in on MBW!

Following my visit, I'll drive back down to SFO and head back home late Tuesday night, arriving back in the UK on Wednesday.

Phew!

PS Thanks also to my brother Ian, for taking over a longstanding commitment I had with my daughters Dance class. He'll be the one operating the lights at a local charity show on the Sunday, while I'm mooching around California - Thanks Bro'!

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New camera required...

So with the upcoming LA trip (and others) in mind, I thinks it's time I invested in a decent camera rather than the cheap and cheerful ones I've always ended up buying in the past.

My needs are simple:

Mandatory

• Shoot in RAW format: I think this is now a given for most serious cameras
• Small and Compact: I don't think I want to go down the full SLR route.
• Point and Shoot: Really, really good automatic settings
• Aperture Support: Going to give Apples Aperture application a spin so the RAW format needs to be compatible.

Optional

• Video support: Would be nice to shoot in 720p
• GPS: Auto geotagging would be great but I'm prepared to use a data logger for GPS tagging

So, anyone got any recommendations?

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A long weekend....

Some exciting news this week, well, exciting for me at least!

I could string it out, but I learnt a while ago, that it's best just to come out with it when it's the type of news that only really impacts you.

I always remember back in the early days of podcasting, there was one weekly tech podcast I used to listen to each week, not a Mac podcast by the way. The host started to bang on about some earth shattering news that he had, but wasn't able to share with us until a certain date. Each week, he would mention this news, building it up and building it up into some really amazing exclusive that would change the face of podcasting forever. By about the third week, I was gagging for this news and he announced that he would reveal all during a special edition of the show the following week. I was beside myself with anticipation.

The next edition of the show rolled around and finally the new was announced.....

He had a book deal.

D'oh!

Now I'm sure it was exciting for him, and quite a significant event in his life but really, it was of little or no interest to his audience. I was pleased for him but after such a prolonged build up and mounting anticipation, it was a real let down and such a disappointment. In fact, I was so disappointed and felt so strongly that I unsubscribed from his podcast and have never listened again to this day.

So I'm very wary of building up buzz and anticipation on things I announce via the show and the blog, if really they only are exciting to me and yes this is one of those instances!

So basically, the news is I've been invited to attend a special screening of the new Star Trek movie over in Los Angeles in 10 days time. It's a special screening put on by Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry (the son of gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original Star Trek) which will also feature a documentary and will have some of the original Star Trek cast in attendance.

It transpires that Rod is a big Mac fan and extended an invitation to a number of Mac podcasters through a mutual friend.

Whilst I originally dismissed the idea of traveling half way round the world for a long weekend to watch a movie, my friends and family thought I'd be mad to miss the opportunity. So further investigations and the realisation that my current airmiles would cover most of the airfare, and the generosity of a certain Mac podcaster who is also going to the event and will be putting me up for a night, it looks as though it's going to happen.

So yes, I'm excited and I had to let you know so I could tweet away on the trip.

I'll also be taking the opportunity to drop in on one of my old friends now know lives out in LA so it should be a pretty memorable trip. The plan is to fly out on the Thursday, spend Friday and Sunday at the resort where the screening is to take place, visit with my friend on the Sunday and fly back Sunday evening arriving back in the UK on the Monday. I'm not sure what state I'll be in or wether jet lag will even have had a chance to kick in, so the show for the following week might be a bit shorter or not as in depth as usual!

So I hope you share with me in my excitement and I plan to tweet as much as I can whilst I'm away.

Just don't unsubscribe!

Please!

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New landing page...

As you may know, I was fortunate enough to get a link back from the Apple website to ScreenCastsOnline, more specifically from the iLife and iWork resources page - original post

In view of this, I cobbled together a special landing page that both aggregated all the specific ScreenCastsOnline tutorials dealing with iLife and iWork, and also gave me a place to measure the traffic coming across from this prestigious site.

Although functional, I wasn't altogether happy with the landing page as I wanted something more professional and informative for new people coming over from the Apple site, after all, first impressions count.

So I decided to hold a competition over at 99Designs, to see if someone could come up with a new design for the landing page. The brief was very simple in that it needed to be a single page framed with the ScreenCastsOnline theme to match the rest of the site. At this point, I was really just looking for ideas I have to admit, so the contest did not include the coding behind the page, just the design. Out of 14 entries, the winner was Jamie Peak, who by chance, also lives in the North of England - small world!

Jamie put together a great design based on boxes and tabs that really gave a professional look and feel to the landing page and after a few iterations, I was happy to award the prize to him.

The next point was how to put the page together.

My main ScreenCastsOnline site is built using Rapidweaver and my original plan was to use the Blocks plugin from YourHead software to create the page. This is a great plugin for building graphical pages. However, Jamies design included a box with multiple tabs which allowed you selectively view the tutorials based on the package in the tab.

I couldn't really see how to implement this in Blocks.

Luckily, as well as being a talented designer, Jamie is also a coder and was happy to quote me for creating the page from scratch in HTML and Javascript. We agreed a price and a couple of days later, Jamie delivered the code. I was then able to take the custom Javascript and CSS and include it into a Rapidweaver HTML page. It took a bit of head scratching but it worked!

There is another section at the footer of the page which I've not included as of yet, but I will when I get a minute.

One of the elements I wanted in the landing page was the inclusion of a "Welcome" video that would allow me to explain exactly what ScreenCastsOnline was all about. It took me a while to get round to this but it's now finished. This is something I need to do more and will create more of these types of videos on other pages.

The last step was to publish the final page but before then, I published it to my test website and set out a tweet to see if I could get any feedback. Wow! I must have received 30 or 40 tweets back, the majority extremely positive, some pointing out some typos, a comment on the volume of the backing music on the video, a missing link and some other comments too. Absolutely invaluable and yet another example of the power of twitter.

Well I fixed all the issues and I'm delighted to say the the new landing page is up and running on the main ScreenCastsOnline website:

http://www.screencastsonline.com/apple/tutorials.html

I love the new look and it's given me some ideas on some other changes I'd like to do to the site to make it easier to use and more attractive.

Thanks Jamie!

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