Lot’s of little things happened yesterday. I hope to set most or all this up an leave it be. The weather will be fantastic this week and I need to be on the bike.
The main router came in an I configured it. The RV042 seems very fast and the interface is easy enough for what I do. Certain web pages, like Hotmail, are surprisingly fast sometimes. I even got the wireless router to work with the netbook.
The Mac Mini for Boxee came in. I got this a good bit stronger than necessary, because it’s so hard to open and upgrade and I need a Mac with modern interfaces to maintain the Drobos. It’s the new Mini, two gig of memory, Core 2 2.0 GHz, and 9400 video. This is now my fastest computer. Drobo2 is plugged into it and it’s Handbraking several of my DVDs into single files for Boxee or iTunes or whatever. This might take a couple of days and then there’s the really big Drobo to do. The EyeTV Tuner is plugged in and it can record TV like Tivo. Not sure how this will integrate. I really like TiVo. Though you can copy anything out of it.
Also, the netbook is handbraking Friends Season 1 that I got this weekend. For comparison, the Mini is clipping along at <30 fps and the Acer is slogging through at <5 fps. Thank God for the queueing feature.
Drobo2 has a 1TB to replace a 250GB and a 640GB that died a few weeks ago in the other Drobo to replace a 37GB. I thought it would say the 640 was dead, but it didn’t. The new 1TB is to ensure there’s no data loss if it decides to fail again and I have a 500GB that came from Drobo1, because it was showing bad during one reboot. This Drobo will stay on the TVMini and be it’s storage, contain single video files. The other Drobo will be permanent deep storage contain the full versions of whatever.
Finally, with the 2 Drobos I don’t feel constantly afraid I’m going to lose everything any minute again. It’s just a matter of seeing that at least one copy of whatever it is makes it to a Drobo. With 1.5 TB drives and sub $100 for 1TB, the price of storage isn’t an issue.