Excitement!

[azekeil]

Two really quite cool things:

First, I hold in my grubby mitts the entire Led Zeppelin collection on vinyl. I'm so looking forwards to getting home and playing these.. except.. argh. I'm on my bike. Luckily kissycat1000 is going to meet me for lunch and take them home with her :)

Second, a company have come up with the non-geek's mass storage 'robot' called Drobo. This is a fantastic invention - it means storage has become simple and - dare I say it - pretty much foolproof. Go and have a look at the video to see for yourself! I wonder if these things can be chained..?

Comments

[sepheri.livejournal.com]

Wow, I think even I could use that!

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

It really is something of a revolution in storage terms - I'm a geek and even I'm thinking of getting one for the reasons I stated in reply to theeighth below...

[theeighth.livejournal.com]

hmmm.. it's kind of like a more flexible 5+1 raid array, but hot-swapping IDE, and with nice bright indicator LEDs.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Kind of.. except it probably works on block replication rather than disk replication - a lot more flexible, but probably with capacity penalties. But with the price of storage, AND the ability to mix and match and buy Just-In-Time - this will probably work out cheaper (not to mention easier) right from the outset. It really is that good. Can you tell I'm excited about this? ;)

[meltie.livejournal.com]

Really want, but USB2 and not firewire - What The Fuck?!

Sod it, where's the network version?

[izzy-stradlin.livejournal.com]

*steals*
:p

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Lol. Actually I need to invest in some stuff to clean vinyl properly. Some of it is just dusty, and some of it appears to have a bit of residue in the grooves - nothing major, but I want to remove it in the right way and learn how to keep them clean. I'll probably pop into my local HiFi shop and speak to them about it and come away with some expensive cleaning stuff...

[serena-lesley.livejournal.com]

The needle will take most of the residue out as it plays, TBH. Don't worry about buying stuff to lift it out until you've played it, checking the needle (and wiping if needed) between tracks.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Cool, OK. I may still go down anyway to hear what stuff they want to try to sell me..

[serena-lesley.livejournal.com]

I know that at one point ther were open slightly later on Thursdays and Fridays, I don't know if this is still the case. Otherwise there's always the weekend. :)

[izzy-stradlin.livejournal.com]

also, a plain duster should be ok for the dustiness.

[ev1ldonut.livejournal.com]

Static charged brush or cloth for stuff not firmly wedged in the grooves. For more stubborn dust, a mix of isopropyl alcohol and pure (distilled) water (about equal parts) to wash it, then rinse off with pure water. Dry with soft cloth, or even better, firmly and carefully clamp to the end of a drill and spin at maximum speed for a few seconds.

My dad has a lot of vinyl. ;)

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Not sure about the procedure with the drill(!) but cool, more advice to add into the pot. Thanks :)

[chocojon.livejournal.com]

The Drobo is very tempting except for it's (1) in America and (2) $699 ...
Also, it's only a USB device rather than a NAS box so you still need a computer to attach it to.
Having said all that, it does look very promising.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. A few downsides, but the technology is available. So, I'm waiting for the NAS version with 8 slots that won't need a Windows box to attach to... then I should be able to get away with just that one box upgrading storage as nessecary, depending on how much useable space I end up with..

Drobo...

[ninneviane.livejournal.com]

If only it wasn't the best part of £350 - this is the answer to my prayers for sure!

[malcygoff.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I wonder how it would handle an enterprise level workload. All of my company backups are currently spooled to a RAID-5 array, and then copied on to external hard drive.
We can easily increase the size of the external hard drives (they are cheap...) but the RAID-5 array is internal to the server, so expensive to replace when the capacity is reached.

I guess that with decent drives (whatever happened to the Maxtor Maxline IIs?) it could easily copy 600gb of critical data a day... *gulp*

p.s. between this and Mojopac - how do you find such nifty devices?!?