Finally bought an iPad

As with most things Apple, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an iPad since I knew of their existence, however was always put off by the lack of multi tasking, however the recent release of iOS 4.2.1 has fixed that problem.

In the recent tech news, there are already a lot of rumours flying around about the iPad 2, suggesting it will have a USB port, a front facing camera, a rear 8 Megapixel camera, carbon fibre back, etc etc. With all these reports, and the release of the new OS, the iPad is back onto my radar.

Tonight (thanks to Tony Lunn), I bought one !….now don’t start saying, “Ooo, did Tony buy you one, what a nice guy ?”, it was due to him I couldn’t resist and bought one.

So here’s how it happened, Text from Tony around 6ish “I’ve been offered a iPad for x amount, what do you recon ?”, I then spent the next 30 mins googling to see what prices they were going for……somehow ended up with one in my basket, then checked the opening times and the nearest store with stock (turned out to be the Leicester store of Comet), jump in the car, drove to Leicester, got lost, spend 20 minutes running through Leicester trying to find the place…..and finally walked out of Comet, 5 minutes before it was closing with a shiny iPad and case.

So, how is it ?…..it’s bloody lovely !

As you know, I’ve got an iPhone 4, had the iPhone 3GS before that, before that had the iPod Touch 2nd Gen….this is the next step up the evolutionary chain.

It does, (as you would expect) everything any other iOS Device does, but just on a bigger screen. To be honest, seeing the difference between the iPhone 3GS screen and the iPhone 4, I was a little worried how this screen would look in comparison to the retina display, but have to say I’m very impressed !, It’s sharp, bright, and everything you would expect from an Apple product.

The model I went for was the 16GB Wi-Fi model, as I plan on buying the next gen when it comes out. Not wanting to scratch it, I also bought the official iPad case thingy with it, which as you can imagine, fits like a glove

When I’ve had a good play with it, I’ll update the post, but for now, it’s play time

As always, unboxing photos below.

Tags: 2nd gen, 3gs, 6ish, amount, Apple, apple product, Carbon, comet, Display, everything, evolutionary chain, existence, googling, ipad, iphone, iphone 4, ipod, ipod touch, leicester, megapixel, multi tasking, nearest store, nice guy, Ooo, place, radar, recon, Retina, rumours, screen, stock, store, time, tonight, touch, usb port

Is 8.75TB too much storage ?

First of all, this little story is made of fail, however I’m happy with the outcome

First of all, let me take you back a couple of years. As myself and C tend to have a lot of shared content, eg Movies, Music, Photos, we used to use the good old shared folders on our Windows PC’s. The downside of this was if a machine was off, you had no access to the shared folder !. So I went with plan B, build a cheap server out of old parts I had kicking around, and have all our content on that. This way neither of the 2 main machines would need to be on, and we could still access shared content.

After 6 month or so running like this, I just found it used far too much power, and went for plan C…a NAS drive. I bought a 500GB Western Digital MyBook World, plugged it into the network, and bobs your uncle, storage that didn’t need a PC to be on. My only issue with the drive was it was very slow, I even upgraded my entire network to gigabit to try and improve the speed, but to no avail. About a year later, I decided to upgrade the firmware on the device, which somehow repartition the drive, meaning I’d lost everything ! ARGH !…it took a piece of software nearly 3 days to recover the content !

So onto plan D, a NAS drive with redundancy….so a forked out a lot of money for a 2TB NAS drive with that hard RAID so if the worse case happens, I just plonk in a new drive, and I’m back up and running again. I went with the Acer Aspire easyStore, which at the time was perfect, I had multiple RAID options, gigabit network, wireless, iTunes server, and media server. I went with RAID5, as I felt this would give a decent amount of performance and would only lose 500Gb to redundancy.

As hard drive do die, I set up a piece of software on both mine and Cs machines called SyncBack. This would mirror our chosen folder to the NAS drive, to ensure we could recover our data. This worked great on the PC’s and can highly recommend it, however when we moved to Mac, I planned on using the Time Machine software build into the OS.

Now for plan E, No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the Macs to see the NAS drive as a Time Capsule, so went with the real deal. I bought the 1TB Time Capsule back in March of this year, and does the job perfect !. Currently I have 2 x iMacs (with 1TB hard drives), 2 x MacBook Pros (with 250GB hard drives) and a MacMini with a 160GB hard drive. Now I know that if you add all that up, that is a lot more than a terabyte, however I was happy that I only had around 500GB of data across all machines at the time, and would address the space issues at a later date when it became an issue.

So about a month ago, the space became an issue, and I bought an external caddy to house a couple of drives I had kicking around. This external caddy allowed 2 drives to be plugged in via USB giving the Time Capsule an additional 750GB to play with.

So early this month, I got the new Apple TV, and got into my head, that I should digitise my entire DVD collection. As it stands, I’ve ripped 72 movies, and 7 boxsets….guess what ?…I’m running out of space on the 2TB NAS drive ! ARGH !…so onto plan F !

I was in 2 minds, I could either upgrade the hard drives in the NAS drive, or get another NAS drive, or get an external hard drive and plug this directly into the MacMini. As you can probably tell from the above, redundancy is key, so the drive would have to have some kind of RAID to ensure the data was safe.

I spend the weekend looking around, and found a decent little 4 drive caddy which had USB, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA connectors, and a variety of RAID options !. After spending what seemed like hours looking, I found a site which seemed to do them for £60 less than everyone else. The model they were selling didn’t have the firewire, however I thought “For £60, I don’t really need firewire”. I ordered this on Wednesday, as well as 4 x Samsung 1TB hard drives, knowing I would lose 1TB with RAID5.

On Thursday, all turned up, I went to the PDF manual I’d downloaded in preparation, but couldn’t find the RAID dip switches ?!?……then it occurred to me, for £60 you don’t only get Firewire, you also get RAID !!! ARGH ! I’d ordered the StarTech SAT3540U2E instead of the S354UFER I’d been looking at and downloaded the manual for !

So Thursday in a panic, I ordered the S354UFER, so now I have both. I could have sent the original one back, but thought I’d keep it and plug this into the back of the Time Capsule giving me the option of having another 2 drives as additional storage. Currently the Time Capsule has it’s own 1TB drive, plus a 500GB, and 3 x 250GB, giving it a total of 2.25TB

Now for the final fail….the S354UFER turned up yesterday, plugged it in via firewire, but I was getting a red light on one of the drive (suggesting it was broken), I moved it up and down the bays, but still got the same !. So….in a panic at 5pm yesterday, I rang the place where the hard drives came from and ordered another drive on Saturday delivery so I could finally build this box.

Today, as expected, the 2nd drive turned up, I put it in the caddy, to only be told another drive had failed !….NO !!!…..I went, had a coffee, double checked the manual, only to find that I hadn’t set the dip switches correctly, and the box was only expecting 3 drives. I flicked them to the right position, and both the old, and the new hard drives work fine ! DOH !

However, all is not bad, it does mean if the worse case happens, I have a spare 1TB drive to slot straight in.

This gives me my total of 8.75TB of storage, the Startech S354UFER with 4 x 1TB hard drives, 2.25TB on the Time Caspule, a 2TB NAS drive, and finally my 500GB MyBook World. Now granted I lose 1.5TB to redundancy however it’s a small price to pay knowing my data is safe

Tags: 2tb nas, amount, avail, cheap server, cs machines, downside, drive, easystore, entire network, everything, firmware, itunes, machine, MacMini, media server, music, music photos, MyBook, mybook world, nas, nas drive, piece, plan b, plonk, power, raid options, raid5, redundancy, software, story, Thursday, time, western digital, western digital mybook, windows pc, worse case, year, yesterday

Halo 3 Finally beat !

As some of you may know, back in October I got a Xbox 360 Elite for my birthday, with Halo 3. Now before I could play Halo 3, I had to complete Halo 2 on the PC, as I’d done the first, but needed complete the play and complete the 2nd, to fill in the story arc.

The 2nd problem I had was that I’ve been a PC gamer for a long as I can remember, and playing a FPS (First Person Shooter) with a controller, it’s just not natural.

Over Christmas I spent a fair amount of time playing FarCry2 on the Xbox 360 and Resistance on the PS3. After many hours of practice I was able to take out my enemies without dying all the time.

This weekend, thought it was about time I got my butt in gear and played Halo 3. I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews, some people hated it, some loved it….me….I really enjoyed it !

It took me about 10 hours to beat on Normal setting, and that’s with me being a controller amateur, loved the story, the vehicles, and especially loved the way you can snap a gun turret off it’s stand, and go on a rampage with it

Personally I’d give it a 8 out of 10.

Tags: 3, 360, amount, amount of time, arc, birthday, butt, Christmas, controller, Cry, elite, enemies, Far, FarCry, farcry2, First, first person shooter, FPS, gamer, gun turret, halo, halo 2, halo 3, October, pc gamer, Person, play, practice, problem, PS3, rampage, Resistance, Shooter, story, story arc, time, xbox, xbox 360, xbox 360 elite