Brian @ Wongside

I got a new hard drive from NewEgg two weeks ago.  It’s a whopping 1TB of space, and it was a steal at $75 with free shipping. Of course the bummer is that the marketing makes it sound bigger than it is.  When formatted, I lose about 70GB of space and am left with 931GB of space.  Talk about shrinkage. I remember the days when a 256MB hard drive was 256 megabytes. They didn’t have any of this funky messing with bits and bytes, decimal and base 2. Oh well. Times have changed.

In any case, I’m very excited to start filling it.  My current hard drive is 250GB (really 228GB). One of the partitions is 180 GB, and it is nearly full of pictures and other data. Between my 10.1 megapixel dSLR and 8 megapixel point-and shoot, I’ve got over 110GB of photos. I’ve also got about 30 GB of iTunes data including music and videos. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I had the 5D Mark II or the Sony Alpha A900. I’d be shooting 1080P HD video (4.8MB/sec = 289MB/min = 17,370MB/hour) and 21 megapixel twenty-four megabyte photos. Ouch!

The one thing I was worried about was if the drive came DOA (dead on arrival). If you look at the user reviews on the right of that NewEgg page, there’s a fair number of people who have complained about that. So in order to mitigate that risk, I took out a couple of insurance policies. The first one is almost literally an insurance policy. I paid extra for the extended warranty.

The second one is that I took the time to stress test the drive. Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, or what utility to use, but that’s what Google is for. The first entry on the list was for something called Barts Stuff Test. Doesn’t sound that compelling from the title, but I figured I’d give it a look. And apparently Google found exactly what I was looking for:

Bst5 (Bart’s Stuff Test v5) is a small win32 application for long term heavy stress testing storage devices. Bst5 supports testing at file and device level.

That ought to do it! And it even supports hard drives of my size and larger:

Bst5 supports very large volumes, up to 16 exabyte (17.179.869.184 Gigabyte) enough to last for at least 30 years.

Perfect!

So I downloaded it, started it up, and let it run. And run. And run. It ran for almost 5 days straight. Nothing broke during that time, so I’m assuming that we’re good.

Thanks Barts! Time to start filling this sucker up.  See ya!

Note: This is Part II of my post/article on a new service from Amazon Web Services. If you didn’t read it, you should go back to yesterday’s post and read the introduction.

The first time I heard of something like this (transferring data via courier/mail rather than over the Internet because it was faster) was back when I lived in SLO. A guy I knew at church worked for a visual effects company that happened to be working on King Kong. As you may recall, most of the effects were done by Weta in New Zealand. Well, Weta needed to offload some of the digital footage to my friend’s company in Santa Maria. They originally intended to send it over the Internet, but that would have been too slow. So instead they made him drive to LA. Huh?

It seemed crazy to me at the time that they’d make him drive the ~6 hours round trip to LA just to pick up the footage. But in the end it really was quicker for them to send the footage to LA via some high speed optical method, and then have my friend drive down to LA to pick up the hard drive. Once in possession of the fully loaded hard drive (or drives), he hopped back in his car to Santa Maria, and then unloaded the hard drives when he got to the office. It proved much more expedient than waiting days for the files to download.

In any case, we’ll see what this does to AWS and S3. It might revolutionize storage; it might change the way companies like SmugMug do business. It’ll be a heck of a lot faster for companies to perform initial backups of data to S3 with their terabytes of data. After that, they can do their incremental backups over the Internet like everyone else. And heck if they have large incrementals, companies could still send update hard drives in the mail.

I wonder if Amazon will eventually accept a sort of “drop shipped” arrangement so that providers built on AWS like Jungle Disk or SmugMug can have their customers mail drives into Amazon, and have their data loaded into the service of choice.

On the enterprise side, can you imagine a corporation sending a shipment of these or these with multi-terabytes worth of data? If you sent over two of those Sun storage boxes, that could be 96 TB of data. Based on the calculations above, that could be 13.1 days via the mail, or 3 years via the Internet. Crazy! What an invaluable savings!

I doubt this is going to be an economic, or business game-changer. (Though I could be wrong, and it wouldn’t be the first time.) But I definitely think it will have an effect–not only on AWS and their ability to cater to customers with massive amounts of data, but also on the entire cloud-computing ecosystem.

Note: I originally intended this to be one post, but it grew to be a monstrosity of a post, bordering on article-length, so I decided to divide it into two parts and post this part tonight. The other part will go up tomorrow. Today’s post focuses on the new technology and the math behind why it’s so incredible. Tomorrow will focus on more commentary and what this could do to the industry.

I’m no soothsayer, and I’m not prescient enough to know exactly what this is going to do, but Amazon Web Services just announced a new “feature” linked to S3 called AWS Import/Export.

Instead of taking hours or days to upload your data over the Internet to Amazon’s data centers, you mail them a hard drive, server, or rack of servers (up to 8U and 50 lbs.) they hook it up to their servers, load the data for you, and your data ends up on S3 automatically.

I’ve gotta note that the name of the service is currently a bit misleading. This is really only AWS Import; it’s  a service where your data is loaded into AWS. There’s currently no way to get the data back out the same way, though that feature is pending. So at this time, a more appropriate name would be AWS Import. We’ll have to wait and see how long it takes them to get the Export functionality up and running. But in either case, it’s going to be fast.

How fast?  Well, let’s consider this in terms of MB/sec?  Here’s the math* :

Suppose you’re the average Joe (or Brian) like me and you’d like to upload 1 TB to S3. You’ve got a speedy cable (upload) connection at 1 MB/sec (8 Mbits/sec).

You’re uploading a million megabytes.
1,000,000 megabytes ÷ 1 megabytes/sec. = 1,000,000 seconds
1,000,000 seconds = 16,666.67 minutes = 277 hours = 11.6 days.

So in order to upload that one terabyte of data, you’ve gotta leave your computer on for 11.6 days of continuous uploading. That doesn’t mention the potential headaches of needing to restart failed downloads, or the sapping of your speed by your neighbors, or the kids downloading HD movies on iTunes.

Now let’s compare that with the deceptively fast method of sending data via “snail mail.”

On the fast end, we could send the 1TB hard drive via overnight mail. Then let’s conservatively estimate that Amazon doesn’t get around to transferring your data until the following evening. That gives you 48 hours of “wasted” travel time. But once they begin transferring, it goes at the speedy, but somewhat conservative clip of 100MB/sec.

1,000,000 megabytes ÷ 100 megabytes/sec. = 10,000 seconds
10,000 seconds = 166 minutes = 2.7 hours
2.7 hours + 48 hours (travel time)= 50.7 hours

So by mailing our hard drive across the country and “wasting” time in transit, we’ve actually saved 226.3 hours or 9.4 days. What a time savings!  Even if you didn’t send your drive overnight, and it took a few days to get there, you’d still be ahead of trying to upload it yourself. Kinda crazy to think that, in a sense, sometimes the fastest transfer method is really one of the oldest.

*For ease of math, let’s assume all numbers are base10, meaning 1MB=1million bytes. I know…I know on most operating systems, 1 MB = 1048576 bytes, but this is for ease of math.

I’m in the market for a new hard drive.  My current 250GB drive is nearly full, and with over 100 GB of photos, it’s time to upgrade. I’ve been watching the 1TB hard drives on Newegg lately, so I was quite astonished when I checked this morning, and found this deal:

$75 for a 1TB hard drive?  With free shipping?  That’s only 75¢ per gigabyte after rebate! But after taking a look at the rebate documentation, I was dismayed to find this disclaimer:

Since when is 1GB only equal to 1 million bytes? That’s a shrinkage factor of 1000 (or 1024 in binary)!!! And they’re saying that formatted capacity may be less than that? Sounds like a deal not worth pursuing.

I’m sure it’s just a typo, but it gave me a laugh, and a good reminder: Caveat Emptor! Let the buyer beware. Sometimes the 1TB hard drive you think you’re buying only really has 1GB of space. haha.

(For those interested, the original rebate form is here and in the event they take the original down a copy can be found here.)

I thought this article on Ars Technica was quite apropos  to my post on the new Mini 10 a few days ago.

It lists the following 5 ways to put your netbook to use around the house:

1. Portable music
2. Second computer for the spouse or kids
3. Media center
4. Kitchen computing
5. Social appliance

I’d say 1 and 4 are most likely to be used around my house. 2 and 3 are possibilities, but would probably encompass a small percentage of the time my netbook would be used.

Portable Music
I like the idea of streaming my iTunes library from my main desktop onto my netbook via WiFi. It’s almost like having an AirPort Express without having to pay the Apple Tax. (Granted my iTunes purchases are of course subject to said tax.) But since it’s so portable, I could carry my netbook into any room in the house and have instant music floating over the 2.4GHz band. Of course, as the article mentions the speaker performance is definitely lacking. That probably means

1. I’ll just have to suffer through poor audio quality.
2. I need to grab my headphones and be tethered to my netbook.
3. I need to plug my netbook into a stereo (which I don’t currently own)
4. I’ll need to use my small, portable Sony speaker with it.

3 seems like the best idea, but at this point, it’s unviable. 1 and 2 are sufferable options, but less than ideal. So I think that leaves me with 4.

Kitchen Computing
Those who know me, know that I like to cook. So the idea of having my netbook as a kitchen companion is fantastic. I can definitely imagine having it sit on the counter ready and available to display the recipe to my next fabulous concoction. Heck, it could even be playing my music at the same time

So there you have it folks, if you don’t already have a netbook around the house, here are 5 ways to justify its purchase.

Last week, Dell introduced the Inspiron Mini 10, the slightly bigger brother of the Inspiron Mini 9, which I wrote about 7 months ago.

This new version comes in at a base price of $399 (which is where the Mini 9 topped out). The “10″ in Mini 10 denotes a 10″ screen size, which is a fairly modest increase. But unlike the Mini 9, which was saddled with a paltry 8GB SSD, the Mini 10 has a spacious 160GB HDD.  And it’s only slightly heavier at 2.86 lbs vs. 2.3 lbs for the Mini 9. That’s only about 8oz difference in weight. Nearly inconsequential at this size.

I won’t be getting one as I’m quite satisfied with my MSI Wind. But if you’re in the market, it certainly is getting crowded, which is only good for consumers. More choices = more supply.  More supply with no change in demand = lower prices and/or better features. There’s your economics lesson for the day.

Earlier this week, I suddenly began to have trouble with the USB ports on my computer. It was quite inexplicable. Of the 6 USB ports on my computer (2 front and 4 in back), only one of them worked.  I tried plugging in a number of devices (USB drive, two wireless mice, keyboard, iPod, digital camera, etc.) into various ports to no avail. And for some reason, I kept getting this utterly unhelpful message:

I would click on the message, and come to a window that showed an “unknown” device somewhere on a USB hub.  But it didn’t give me any indication of what the device was, or where it was plugged in.  If I clicked the X to close the pop up it waited about 2 seconds before showing it again. The only way I could get it to stop popping up was to leave the device window open.  I tried restarting my computer, shutting down, leaving it off for a while, and booting it up again, but none of these fixed it.

I even imaged my hard drive, reformatted, and reinstalled a clean image on the computer.  I figured if anything, that would fix my problem.  Alas, I was wrong.

So I went to everyone’s favorite troubleshooting tool: Google.  I searched for the error message I was receiving, and I came up with the following article:
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/usb-device-not-recognized/

It suggests a stupid simple solution to the problem: unplug the PC, and plug it back in.  And you know what?  It worked!  All I did was unplug the computer, I mean, literally unplug it from my UPS, wait about 30 seconds, and then I plugged it back in.  I booted up the computer, and viola!  All my USB ports were magically working again.

Exactly why this works, I have no idea.  The above article suggests it has something to do with static electrical buildup.  But I’m no electrical engineer, so I have no idea.

In any event, if you happen to have similar issues, and can’t get your USB ports to work, try this stupid simple solution.

I promised that I’d post pictures of my MSI Wind when I got a chance. Sorry they took so long.

My MSI WInd came in today.  I can’t believe it came here so fast.  I ordered it Tuesday night (meaning they didn’t receive or process until Wednesday morning), I got a confirmation Wednesday, and it was dropped off on my doorstep by Fedex this afternoon.
I took a bunch of pictures, so I’ll have to post those soon. But this thing is amazingly tiny.  I can’t believe it.  The one annoyance I have thus far is the keyboard.  The period (.) and the forward slash (/) keys are shrunken down.  They keys in general aren’t very big, but these two in particular are extra small.  That makes it pretty difficult when typing in web addresses.  I never realized how important those keys were.  What they should have done is made the Shift key smaller and slid it over to the right a bit.  Oh well.

In the end, we’re only talking about a computer that I paid $310 for, so in some respects, it’s almost a disposable computer.  Come 18 months, or even a year, and I won’t feel too bad about buying a new one.

I ordered an MSI Wind from Buy.com today. It’s a next generation net-book.  And it’s got some pretty cool specs:

• CPU: Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
• Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition.
• Display: 10″ WSVGA LCD
• RAM: 1GB DDR2
• Hard Drive: 120GB SATA I
• Built-in 10/100 Ethernet
• Built-in 802.11b/g WLAN Card / No Bluetooth
• Weight: 2.3 lbs (3 cell)

Yup, you read that last one right: 2.3 lbs.  I think this will be the perfect computer to take on our honeymoon.  I figure I can download all my pictures from my camera to this thing both as a backup, and as additional storage.  I’ll also be able to connect to the internet to upload them if necessary.

Finally, it will be a great little machine for checking e-mail, making Skype calls (both audio and video since it has a webcam) as necessary.  (FYI, I don’t really plan on talking to anyone from the “outside world” on my honeymoon, but if it’s necessary, it’s nice to have the ability.)

I can’t wait for it’s arrival!