Playstation Plus

I’ve got a few good things to say about Sony’s Playstation plus, however a lot of bad things. Granted it’s still in it’s infant stages, but it’s so lacking at the moment, especially when you compare it with the Xbox Live service.

When firmware 3.60 was release, with the online storage option, I finally took the plunge and dropped £40 on a Playstation Plus subscription. I’m in a fortunate position where I have 2 PS3′s, (one in the front room, and one in the bedroom), and the idea of being able to save to the “cloud”, then pick up again in another room really appealed to me. I also like the idea of the automatic download feature, that basically downloading the updates to the games while the machine is switched off. This would fix one of the things I find most annoying about the PS3 over the Xbox, size of the updates, for some reason updating a game on the Xbox takes literally seconds, where the PS3 takes minutes….sometime even hours (Currently updating GT5 as we speak)

Now maybe I should have read up on this first, or at least spent some time in the forums reading peoples impressions first before dropping the £40, but was what I was hoping for.

• The ability to save directly to the cloud, and pickup on another PS3 (just like the Steam Cloud)
• The ability for the PS3 to download my updates while I slept (this way I never had to see again the “There is an update, do you want to download it” screen)

What I actually got….

The ability to manually backup my save games to the cloud (the same functionality we used to have with a USB stick……). Unfortunately non of my games recognise the cloud storage, so it means I have to manually download my save game, then remember to re-upload it once I’ve finished playing. This has already caught me out a number of times….I fired up a game of the other PS3, only to have to quit to the XMB to copy the save game local….or even fire up the other PS3 to copy the game to the cloud :s

On the subject of copying, Sony really don’t make it easy. Probably like most people, the first thing I did was to copy all my save games on to the cloud storage, this I had to do once save at a time !…..there is a “group saves by game” function, but you still have to go into the grouped folder and manually copy each one across….took me an evening to back everything up.

Next the storage size…..150Mb ?….in this day and age…..when each one of my later Fallout 3 saves were over 5Mb each….obviously I didn’t have room to fit them all on, come on Sony, if the likes of Dropbox can offer us 2GB for free, 150Mb is a joke.

So, once I’d back up all my saves, I thought…ok time for the automatic download setting. Once I’d finally found the setting, I selected my 2 hour windows of “when to download” and left it too it. I then went to the 2nd Ps3 to set up the automatic download on that, in the hope to select a different 2 hour windows, but was politely told that I already have automatic download setup on my account, and I do have it on this or the other 1, but not at the same time …….really ?

Now if my understanding is currect, the automatic download feature is useless if you use the cloud storage, as it uses your local save game files as it’s base of “what to download”, if there are no saves on the PS3 (which on mine there aren’t as they’re all in the cloud), then it doesn’t download anything !….*clap, clap, well done Sony*

Ok, so finally the content, and what you really get for your £40 a year. Now I agree, you do get benefit when you have a plus subscription, but are they worth it.

Below is the list of what I downloaded from the Playstation plus “benefits”

Sonic the Hedgehog (not HD’d up, just added trophies), looked and sounded horrible

Astro Tripper, Pix’n Love and Enigmo (all mini games, played once, and deleted)

inFamous 2 Dynamic theme (does look pretty cool, I have to say)

All apart from the theme have now been deleted, this was from the below list of possible downloads for the month of March

2 March to 5 April 2011
All titles are for PlayStation 3 unless stated otherwise.

Games
Sonic the Hedgehog – one month exclusive for PlayStation Plus members
Astro Tripper
Pix’n Love Rush (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members
Enigmo (minis) – two weeks early for PlayStation Plus members

Full Game Trial
Prince of Persia

Special Offers
PlayTV Live Chat – 25% off until 6 July 2011
Fat Princess – 50% off
Fat Princess (PSP) – 50% off
StarDrone (PS3) – 50% discount on day of launch
Premier Manager – 50% off

Dynamic themes and Premium Avatars
EyePet Avatars
inFamous 2 theme
Sega Mega Drive Classics theme
MotorStorm Apocalypse Urban Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Burning Avatar
MotorStorm Apocalypse Rookie XMB theme

Maybe I’m just disappointed as I was expecting more, I was hoping for Steam Cloud type storage, I was hoping to never see a “Update is available” screen again, but currently this isn’t the case.

Maybe now they have the Cloud storage backbone in place, developers will release updates to their games to allow saving directly to this. I do however think that if they get their butts into gear and get this working properly before the NGP (Sony’s Next Generation Portable aka PSP2) comes out, then saving a game on the PS3, then continuing on the NGP ticks all my boxes. I know that Microsoft attempted to do this Windows to Windows Mobile to Xbox….but it’s not really happened yet.

Personally if anybody is planning on dropping on the PS+ subscription, I don’t think it’s worth it yet, give it a couple of months and see if developers start to implement the “direct to cloud” saves.

Tags: Astro, bedroom, cloud, Download, Dynamic, feature, firmware, fortunate position, functionality, game, games, Impressions, infant, infant stages, machine, option, pickup, Pix, Playstation, plunge, Princess, PS3, reading, reason, screen, Size, sony, steam, steam cloud, storage option, time, xbox, xbox live, xmb

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

Apple Time Capsule

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