memoryloot

The morning when Apple announced that they were going to release the MacBook Air, I came across a couple of comments on Gizmodo’s site where people were saying that you can buy 5 EEEPC. What the hell was a EEEPC? After a brief search, I found 2 sites that was interesting. First, the official Asus EEEPC site which was the sales site for this little machine. The second site was the EEEUser site. This was the unofficial fan site. After reading about it, I found myself compelled to purchase one. I checked Amazon and saw that they sold this wonderful machine. I quickly ordered one with a 8GB SDHC memory card for extra storage.

I received it this past weekend and have been carrying this little machine around. It runs a Xandros Linux operating system. The systems is very straight-forward and easy to use. It’s perfect for on the go computing. I just need something to jump onto the Internet or small tasks like taking notes wherever I go. It’s tiny and unobtrusive. Boots up really fast from a cold shutdown. One complaint I have is that it gets hot which then kicks off the somewhat noisy fan. Battery life could be better since this thing doesn’t use your standard hard drive. It uses a 4GB Solid State Drive (no moving parts). The folks over at the EEEUser site have been doing alot of hacking to their system. I think I’m fine with the default OS installation. I thought I was wanting a full-blown Linux OS but this interface from Xandros is very useful and I don’t need anything more than what is offered there.

This thing isn’t going to win any computing race. But when you think about the purpose of this machine, it does the basics at a quarter of the price of something similar in size. Don’t expect to buy this to be your primary machine. The screen is too small and it doesn’t have enough juice to be doing heavy lifting like image manipulation, video editing, or even documentation. But for the times when you just need a machine to quickly get onto the web or jot down a quick note, this is perfect. So for those who can’t afford a MacBook Air but would like a portable system, I ask you to consider this.

Another post inspired by the lack of information on the Internet. Here’s some background information. I run a Linux file server at home for about 5 years now. I recently hit the 80% capacity of a 200GB hard disk and was looking for more storage on my file server. The file server is a dual processor Celeron 500Mhz with the 200GB in a RAID 1 configuration and about 768MB of memory. That means my data is being mirrored between both drives. In theory if one should fail, I still have the other one. I also have an extensive back-up procedure using 2 external hard drives. I’ll go over that at a later time.

At first I wanted to rebuild my entire system and stick in a couple of higher capacity drives. That didn’t seem feasible since that may cost me a chunk of change and in reality, I don’t need a faster system. Just more storage. I had opened up my system and realized I couldn’t even add another disk controller since I am out of PCI slots. Since I have a Firewire card in the machine and my external drives are attached that way, I decided to see if there are any possibilities of getting a hard drive enclosure with Firewire (IEEE1394a specifically), RAID capabilities, and SATA drive interface. There were many that fulfilled 2 of the 3 features but there was only 1 that had all these requirements met. I even posted a question on LinuxQuestions.org to see if anybody had used this before. Unfortunately no one responded. Instead I was asked to see if I can provide some feedback. So here it is!

I snatched one up at FireWire Depot’s website. I also bought 2 500GB hard drive from Fry’s Electronics which was mentioned in the previous post. For $.18 per GB, it was the cheapest deal around. I was so tempted to get the 1TB drive but decided to save some money. That’s still plenty of storage for awhile.

The enclosure finally was delivered today. So I spent sometime installing and documenting the setup. But first let’s see what is included:

Here are a couple of pictures of the box that arrived

A bit fuzzy but here are the front and rear of the enclosure. The box seems very well built.

Here is what’s included. You get a power cord, Firewire cables (both 400 & 800), USB cable, some screws with the disk lock key, and a sheet of instructions. Pure and simple.

The ports in the back reveals 2 Firewire connections and a USB connection.

Here are both of the disk rack removed from the enclosure.

The enclosure without the racks.

Under each disk rack, there is a fan for cooling.

Empty disk rack. A view from the rear.

Front of the rack with a display and some buttons.

Ok, enough eye candy for now. Let’s see what is needed to get things setup on my Linux Slackware 10 system.

1. I changed the setting on the enclosure to make sure that it treats the disks as a RAID 1 setup and nothing else. The number was suppose to be “0”. You do that by simply pressing on little “-” and “+” buttons with a pen or pencil tip.
2. I changed the jumper settings on my disk to SATA I opting for reliability than performance. Even though the company I bought it from stated that SATA II was supported, the literature did not mention SATA II anywhere. Seeing that so many people are having DOA disk, it seems that they are using the disk in default setting of SATA II enabled.
3. I installed both disk into the drive racks. It took 6 screws to hold a snug fit. The rack had a heat sensor that I had to slip in there. Fairly straight-forward.
   
4. Plugged the drives back into the enclosure and connected the enclosure to my laptop. I powered the enclosure and the laptop on with System Rescue CD booting up (If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend downloading this and burning it onto a CD to add to your arsenal of tools for techie problems.).
   
   Shiny blue lights!
5. Start X-windows and launched gparted. I used this tool to an upgrade of my laptop hard drive a couple of months ago. Excellent tool. It had no problems recognizing the single device. Remember, the OS has no idea that this enclosure is RAID 1.
   
6. Gparted asked me to create a disk-label. I selected MS-DOS, which was default. I did some research and found that this is correct for Linux systems.
7. It then let me create a partition. I selected ext3 since my other drives on the box was ext3. It had no problems creating this partition.
8. I then quit out of System Rescue CD and powered down everything.
9. The enclosure was attached to the file server finally. Before I powered it on, I had to unmount and turn off the other enclosures. I also had create an entry of the /etc/fstab file and create the new mount point.

   /dev/sda1 /u2 ext3 defaults 1 2

   You may notice that this was created on the sda device. Depending on which devices is plugged in and powered first, it will get the first device name. This means the RAID enclosure must always be the first Firewire device plugged in and powered before any of the other enclosures.

10. I finally powered the RAID device on. Unfortunately the system didn’t see the device. I had run the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script. Slackware 10 apparently has a bug that it won’t detect hotplugged Firewire drives without rescanning for it. I had to add the script call in my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file as well as the mount to the enclosure so that it boots up mounted. Why not upgrade to the recent Slackware? Nah! Upgrading to another version is a waste of my time when Slack 10 has been great. It may not be an elegant solution but it’s been working for 5 years now!
11. Rebooted the system to double-check that the enclosure comes up. It did!
    
    Here’s my server with the ezRAID enclosure sitting on top.

All-in-all a very simple implementation. I’m still testing the enclosure by transferring items into and out of it. Symbolic linked a couple of folders that I access through Samba and testing on both a PC and OS X system. I am streaming videos and music off of it. So far so good. Hopefully no dead hard drives. If so I’ll note it in another post.

**Edit 01/20/2008: This post is linked from the following website: http://technology.anything08.com/setting-up-an-ezraid-enclosure/. This looks like a generic blog that someone put together that takes posts from various blogs online. It thinks that this site is called Patrickâ??s Notebook? I did a quick whois search and found that it is owned by NameCheap.com. Looks like a parked site from a domain company.

For those who are technically deficient I recommend turning away from this post. I’m writing this because I couldn’t find any resources regarding this specific problem. Hopefully the spiders creep up on this and puts it out there to help others who are looking for this solution.

This week, Fry’s Electronics brick and mortar store had the Western Digital Cavier SE16 500GB SATA WD5000AAKS drive on sale for $90 a piece. I picked up two for a RAID 1 configuration only to realize from people all over the Internet that this drive has TLER (Time-Limited Error Recovery) disabled. This means that the drive self-corrects errors at a much longer time than normal. These drives are considered consumer drives which are designed for the desktop use. Western Digital would rather have the consumer spend more money on purchasing the RE drives which are more for server environments. The difference in TLER means that one that has it disabled, will correct the errors at a longer interval of time (~2 minutes) compared to others that have it enabled and set for a shorter interval of time (usually 7 seconds). This means that if you have a RAID configuration and your drive has TLER disabled, it will take a much longer time to respond if it is in error correction mode and thus tell the RAID controller that your redundant disc array has failed. This is well documented in some customer feedback on the NewEgg product page.

After further digging, I found that other models such as the RE line of drives have this utility for you to change that TLER values. Western Digital offers this utility on a as needed basis. You would have to get in contact with their support to get it. Luckily, I found this posting that had information on getting this. It also has links to creating a bootable jump drive should you need it.

I tested and confirmed that you can enable the TLER using the utility on the WD5000AAKS drive.

I didn’t have any formal New Years Resolution. Instead, I formed some really good habits. The first thing I’ve been doing frequently is flossing my teeth. Ever since my first visit to the dentist a couple of months ago, I’ve been flossing every single day without stopping. It may not seem so ground-breaking but if you know me, it is HUGE! Considering I haven’t taken care of my teeth for 13+ years. I’ve been bad about oral hygiene. I feel I’ve talked about this before, but whatever!

The second thing I’ve been doing is keeping up with my work-out regime. I’ve been running about 6-12 miles a week. Shon and I are training for the LA Marathon 2009. I have over a year until that event takes place. We’re gonna run in some 5K, 10K, and half marathons. I think at this point, I can easily do a 5K. But I’m about 9 weeks away from doing it non-stop. All this running is making all sorts of places on my body ache.