Posted by Ub3rG33k on Mar 18, 2010 in
Apple 
As mention in my Happy Mac Day post I was awaiting delivery of the Apple Time Capsule ,and as assumed it did arrive today.
I have to say, Apple once again made setting up and installing this device an absolute pleasure !
Below are the unboxing pics
..and finally a picture of it inplace
Now in true Apple style, the setup was flawless, I put it on the shelf, I plugged it in, and that was it ! The iMacs and MacBook Pro all popped up with a prompt saying Time Capsule detected, do you want to set up Time Machine ?
Click yes, input the password and your away.
Did this on all the Macs in the house. The initial backup took a little while, however after that there is a silent hourly backup which you don’t even notice, and it’s good to know my data is now safe !
As you can see from the last image, I’m a little paranoid about my data, on the left I have the 2TB Acer Aspire Easystore, in the middle I have the 500GB Western Digital My Book World, and obviously on the right is the Time Capsule.
I tend to store the majority of my data on the EasyStore as this is set up with Raid 5, giving 1.5Tb of storage and losing only 500Gb to the parity recovery. I did use the MyBookWorld, however upgrading the firmware broke it, and had to spend the best part of a week recovering the data.
So with all this backup, why have I got the time capsule you may ask ?, well let me tell you.
I have a tendency of keeping an extremely clean desktop. If possible I will have nothing on it, however will use it as a temporary file store for the work I’m currently doing. Once I’ve done I tend to just delete everything, and then empty the recycle bin. Unfortunately on more than 1 occasion I’ve needed one of the files I’ve deleted.
Another reason is because C doesn’t tend to use the EasyStore as much as I, and tend to keep everything on her desktop on her iMac and MacBookPro, which means if the worst case happened, she would lose everything !
All in all, I’m very happy with this addition to my network, and can highly recommend getting one if you have a Mac
Tags: absolute pleasure, acer, Apple, Apple Time, aspire, backup, Below, capsule, delivery, desktop, device, digital, easystore, everything, firmware, Happy, imac, imacs, inplace, mac, Mac Day, macbook, macbookpro, machine, macs, mention, mybookworld, parity, picture, pleasure, post, pro, raid 5, setup, shelf, storage, style, time, time capsule, time machine, today, Western, western digital, worst case
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Feb 19, 2009 in
Microsoft 
I’ve decided to give Windows 7 another go, as there have been a few driver updates. This time in changed my SATA2 drive to Native mode instead of AHCI, and the install went flawless.
Once up, Windows downloaded 5 updates, and had 4 additional drivers for my Bluetooth dongle, Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit LAN, ATI 2900 Graphics card, Razer Copperhead gaming mouse.
The spec of my machine is as follows
ASUS M2R32-MVP
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
4Gb OCZ 6400 Memory
ATI 1Gb HD2900 XT PCI-e
1 x 500Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drive
2 x 250Gb Western Digital SATA2 Drives
1 x Pioneer 112 DVD-RW (Again wiped out the Pioneer 212 SATA drive as this again caused issues)
Onboard ADI 1988A Soundcard (Wiped out the SoundBlaster Xtreme Gamer sound card, don’t ask !)
Acer AL2216 Monitor
Acer AL1916 Monitor
Razer Copperhead Gaming Mouse
Logitech G15 Gaming keyboard
Creative 5.1 Surround speakers.
Windows 7 now works fine, with the new driver updates, and the download of the Logitech G15 driver and utility, everything seems smooth. I did however have a problem where every 5 minutes or so, Windows would give me a BSOD with a tdx.sys error message, however after a little bit of googling, it seems Windows 7 has a problem with AVG Free anti-virus.
Granted I was only up and running for a few hours last night, but I did a little bit of testing.
Steam, worked fine, all games apart from World of Goo seemed to work ok, apart from all games being at a status of “Download Started…”
Warcraft worked fine, infact better than fine, I saw an increase of over 20 frames per second.
Itunes, worked flawlessly
Left 4 Dead work, and worked very well, without a glitch
Gadgets I’ve tried, and worked.
WhetherBug
Multi Meter (D)
Network Meter v2.1
GMail Checker
Utorrent Gadget
Now this is running fine on my main machine, I will create further blogs as I decide if I love/hate Microsoft’s latest operating system. So far I think it’s quicker, uses resources better, is stable, however it’s still early days.
I would like to point out that I have a lot of 720p content on my NAS drive, and without installing any video or audio codec, it played the videos straight out of the box, very impressive
Tags: 112, 1988a, 2900, 4, 7, acer, adi, ahci, al1916, al2216, amd athlon 64, amd athlon 64 x2 6000, asus, ati, Beta, bluetooth dongle, bsod, card, copperhead, dead, digital, Download, drive, driver, driver updates, fine, free anti virus, g15, gaming, gaming mouse, gigabit lan, googling, graphics card, itunes, LAN, left, logitech, logitech g15 gaming keyboard, M2R32, machine, Monitor, mouse, mouse logitech, MVP, native mode, pioneer, problem, razer, razer copperhead, sata, soundblaster, soundcard, steam, tdx, tdx.sys, warcraft, Western, windows
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Jan 15, 2009 in
Tech 
I’ve added to my toy collection, I’ve bought (as the title would suggest) a new NAS Drive.
I’ve has for the pass couple of years a 500Gb Western Digital MyBookWorld, which as ….well ok, well, slow, unstable, and over heats all the time.
I had quite a manual process to back this up too, I had to keep a machine on all the time, to run a scheduled task, to sync all the contents on the NAS drive to an external 500Gb hard drive, this was effective, however kind of overkill for a simple backup solution.
btw, the reason I’m so paranoid about backup, is a new firmware came out for the NAS drive, so I thought “OOOO, possible speed increase”, so upgraded, and it fell over Grrrrrr !, you can only imagine the paid and suffering I went though to a retrieve the content from the drive, the rebuild the linux partitions….not something I really want go through again.
Anyway, back to the Acer NAS drive, this drive is quick !, and I mean really quick !! (ok, getting around 18Mb /sec transfer speed, so about 3 times faster that the MyBookWorld)
It’s got an Itunes and Media server which supports Vob files (a god send for me streaming HD content to my PS3.
Currently running in Raid 5 (as raid 10 (0+1) isn’t available, so getting high read speeds, ok’ish write speeds, and 1.5TB of parity backup storage 
It does come with Wireless access too, however this is switched off as it’s connected to my Gigabit network.
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4 x Serial ATA Hard Drives |
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10/100/1000 Ethernet, auto MDI/MDIX |
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MP3, WAV/PCM, WMA, AC3/AAC, OGG, AIF/AIFF |
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VOB, AVI, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9 |
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19 V 150 W external power adapter |
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Tags: 500gb hard drive, acer, aspire, AVI, backup, backup solution, backup storage, client, content, digital, disk, drive, gigabit, gigabit network, hard, hard disk drive, itunes, Linux, Mac OS, media server, MPEG, mybookworld, nas, Network, parity, power, Raid, raid 10, raid 5, raid level, serial ata hard drives, server, SMB, speed, speed increase, support, technical specifications, time, toy collection, transfer speed, vob, vob files, Western, western digital, windows, wireless access, X
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