Iomega Prestige 1.5 TB USB HDD

Time for some more storage at home – the old 250 GB Freecom HDD was getting a little tight on space. So a quick stop on Christmas Eve at PC World (normally not a good experience) and I chanced upon a 1.5 TB Iomega drive at £80 or so. 6x the size – nice.
I was initially hesitant; the name Iomega normally is associated with the phrase “click of death”, a symptom of the old Iomega Zip disks of the 1990’s. However, the price point, and 10+ years of water under the bridge and them still being in business made me consider it a reasonable purchase.
The drive was instantly recognised by my Acer Aspire Revo (running Debian Linux). The disk auto-mounted with its VFAT file system no problem; however, instantly it started to… wait for it … click! Noooo!
I reformatted to make it a Physical Volume for LVM, and then made a new Logical Volume (LV) with an XFS file system. It seems the disk still does the clicking/ticking every once in a while, normally after some period of inactivity.
It’s about 4 – 7 clicks/ticks, about once every half a second, the entire episode lasting around 10 seconds.

JEB’s rules of IT

  1. Always have a backup.
  2. Always monitor your backups.
  3. Always backup your monitoring.
  4. Always investigate failures; work out how to monitor it to catch it quicker next time (hopefully before it fails).

Backups without monitoring is no backup at all; if your backups fail, you won’t know until you try to use them.

A note about RAID

Unmonitored RAID 1/5/6/10 is no better than a single disk; as each disk pops, you’ll never notice until the last one goes.

A note about UPS’s

UPS’s fail, OK.

Resilience and cost

Resilient, fast, and cheap; chose any two.

Lies in status messages

Just because something says OK, doesn’t mean it is OK.

More HP DreamSceen Musings

So, it’s been a few weeks, and there still doesn’t seem to be any news about an HP supported SDK or even a hack to get into the HP DreamScreen. More interesting comments on this blog; I concurr with the timings for starting “apps” and navigating menus – way too slow to react.

I think the main point is nicely summed up – when “the community” gets inside this device there will be a possibility of realising the potential of an intelligent picture frame — the kind of self-populating, automatically updating, no-user-input required device that you would give to your parents and siblings to keep in touch. They shouldn’t have to navigate through my Snapfish albums manually – it should just happen!

Sigh.

HP Dreamscreen 130 – first impressions

It’s a very clean, crisp screen. It’s a neat package, but boy — is it heavy. Even the stylus-like “stick” that screws into the rear of the frame to make it stand up feels like a fishing weight rather than a mere stand.

The default installed firmware was fine – it powered up, and within 30 seconds I was on the wireless network. Like most geeks, first thing was to tell the unit to go and perform a firmware check, which id dutifully did; and thus is downloaded and applied its first update smoothly. Well done, HP.

There is a “home screen” type of interface, with which you can launch any of the apps the literature talks of, or via the configuration of the device, you can tell it to launch a slide show when its idle. Sadly, the “slide show” it does when “idle” (which will be most of the time) is only from local storage. That’s not what I want; when idle, I want it to go and load some online content – photos from Facebook, Snapfish (or Flikr). I basically want it to be a hands-free automatic updating remote display for my online photo album. HP: please address this!!

The Facebook app is very good if you know what pictures you want to show, but for my taste seems to require far too much interaction. Your only choise here is to select which friend’s albums you wan tot see, and then browse their albums. I’d just like to see (or chose) which friends albums are going to be displayed (probably with their name somewhere on the screen, maybe with the caption as well).  Like a “recent photos from FriendA, FriendB, FriendC”, and have the “standby mode” of the DreamScreen just go find recent items from this selection.

Here’s something HP got correct: you can tell it to turn on at one time, and off at another. Great for night time in the bedroom: photo frame goes of at 11pm, and back on at 7am.

Next up – when idle, it would nice nice if we could get the “clock” app to display the time(s)  (with an alpha channel??). Or, for that matter, the weather for the configured location.

Minor bug bear for me; entering a password doesn’t obscure the entered password as you type it from the on-screen keyboard.

There’s a calendar app in here; it shows… a calendar. Wouldn’t this be so much better if you could give it a URL to an ICS or ICAL file and get it to display your calendar appointments? (Don’t forget to set a refresh period, and have the calendar be able to always show the current day/week/month).

More interesting tid-bits as I keep playing with this.