I had a spare USB Drive made by iOmega and is a 500GIG Dive and if I remember correctly it is a IDE type drive inside not SATA.  The goal was to have this drive plugged into the imac and use it as a time machine backup drive. I started time machine running but after a few minutes the drive went from the desktop and time machine complained it had no drive to back up to. The only way to get the drive back was to power it off and on. This left me puzzled, so I turned to the PC next to my iMac to do some serious testing.

Will the drive fail on Windows?

It crossed my mind that the drive was getting hot after constant use and failed, to make sure this was the case I plugged it into a computer running Windows 7 and the goal her was to torture test the drive and see if it either kept working or indeed failed.

I formatted the Drive and made sure it was a full not a quick format – this took a long while (as you would expect) and at no point during this test did the drive stop working. I then moved onto copying as close to 500GIG and once again this took a long while but passed with flying colours. It was obvious from these test so far then that the drive was as much working as humanly possible right.

Testing once again on OSX Lion

Now that we know it is working, let us move it back to the iMac, started copying some files and after 10 minutes (it’s a random time) the light goes out, the drive is no longer there and I did try all the USB Ports on the back of the computer.

I shall do more testing with other drives (I have a 320GIG handy) to see if this a LION issue.

In the world of online Backup there is many companies who offer the ability to backup all your data to the cloud and you can sleep at night safe in the knowledge that even in the event of loosing all your local storage (fire, theft or whatever), you can always get your files back. Mozy used to cost a simple $4.95 a month and with this you could back up as much data as you seen fit. Other Providers for example let you choose a directory but in fact stripped out Video files, ISO files and so forth – so there complete backup was not so complete after all. Mozy have now dropped the unlimited data plan and we have $5.95 a month for 50GIG Data or $9.99 for 125GIG. People are up in arms – how dare they restrict what we backup and why did they offer unlimited in the first place?

What is unlimited?

I shall use an analogy here, imagine I said you can drive your car as much as you like and as far as you like, Unlimited if you will. Of course we all know that a car need fuel to make it go anywhere and at some stage you would have to stop to get some more – but you can still do what I said in the first line right? Many Services such as Broadband providers, Web Hosting services, Mobile Phone providers and Backup providers are saying “You can use our service Unlimited” but at some point along the way you find out it is not in fact unlimited and you are restricted.

In the case of Broadband, they can share a fast line with so many people with the thought that not everyone will be on at the exact same time. When people all leave the computers grabbing files 24/7 – soon the providers has to put some restrictions on there and what they do is slow you down in fact – at this point you can still use the service “Unlimited” – just not as fast as you would have hoped.

In the case of WebHosting, much the same as above and we all agree there is no such thing as an Unlimited Harddrive on sale just yet right? In the real world people do not Back up 800GIG worth of data – that’s just a silly amount. 

What should people be backing up?

On the average Windows Computer in front of you now, if you wiped it clean and rebuilt ir from scratch without backing anything up – ask yourself “What have I just lost?” The reality is that The operating system is on a DVD (or should be) as well as your applications, what you should have left that is not there is any documents, picture’s, videos and music.

If you are of legal standing – all your music should be around still on them old things called cd’s and anything you bought in iTunes can be downloaded again. I am not sure what Videos people have lying around, I am guessing stuff they have recorded themselves but if you can apply compression and get the size down anyhow and do you really need to watch something you recorded three years ago? This leaves documents and such.

The free Solution

There is many free services while allow you to automatically back up all your ‘normal’ files such as DropBox for example. These services only give you 2 GIG or data but you can buy more if needed or you can sign up for a few different one’s and back up that way.

How do Business Backup?

In a business, everything is stored on a server and we are talking a lot of data. This data is stored on RAID 5type arrays which means if a drive fails – you can insert a new one and everything will be all fine. Expanding on this of course is Tape Backup – Each night a backup is run which takes all the Data you specify and places this on a Tape. The complete set of tapes is taken offsite each night so in the event the whole building is burned to the ground – all the data is still safe and sound. As Tapes are done each day, you can go back days, weeks or even months to find the right files to restore.

Storing it everywhere

In my collection, I have two NAS Boxes, one with 4TB internal and 1TB external (USB) while the Other NAS has 1TB Internal and 1TB External (eSATA). My Music collection is backed up to the other NAS, if I loose One NAS, I still can have my entire Music collection – very slim chance for both drives to go at the exact same time.

I have a vast collection of Wallpapers – again this is split across two drives and it is stored in effect on my Gallery I use for this site, so we can rule out loose them anytime soon. What we have left is movies, now if I lost them, this is no major concern or something to loose sleep over. The one’s I have made are stored on various video websites such as YouTube and such and personally, not worth worrying about anyway.   

Another idea for Backup?

A couple of Idea’s here really:

One idea is to have an external harddrive which are quite cheap these days and run a program to sync your drives to this one. You can then take this drive and pop it in your bag and take it with you when you go to work (though constant moving an external hard drive might kill it sooner than later). This is like an Offsite backup if you like.

Next idea is to find a friend who is prepared to set up an online backup service but once again moving 800GIG over two broadband connections is going to take you months to back it all up.

Bottom Line

You as a person need to ask yourself what data is really important and what you cannot live without. Hard drives will eventually fail and DVD media will get scratched but do you really need to Backup 800GIG and how often is this changing anyhow?

After seeing various reviews littered about the web and watching video’s of people using and unboxing a pogoplug, there was not enough detailed write up about how it works on a day to day unit rather than just something to shares your files across the internet. I had spotted this device in a local store for £79, the retail price was £99, so a saving of £20 to be had. Was this a cheap NAS box that could suit my needs or would it turn out to be something slow and unusable.

Un-Boxing and plugging in

The box is pink and so is the unit, while it might attract the girls to the table, I am sure most men might be put off when looking in the store and seeing a Pink box. Why the company choose pink for the colour is beyond me, I am sure they would see more if they had say Black or silver.

Inside is the Pogoplug, the power cable and a white network lead. It is a rather nice packaged box and you do feel you got your money worth. I plugged in the PogoPlug, supplied it with a gigabit network connect and attached 4 USB Drives. I went through the online activation which basically found my pogoplug and I had to confirm the email was correct and we were now online with the device.

Accessing it via Windows

I went to the pogoplug site and downloaded a windows 7 64bit install program, on install it asked for my login and also asked if I wanted Multi Drive mode (each drive attached to the Pogoplug gets its own drive letter). It also went through some wizard to auto copy all my media (Movies, Pictures and Music) to the Pogoplug but I skipped this part, Like to do this by hand.

What happens now is a Drive letter appears (P:) and inside this is each drive which I had already named by the web interface and the total of all drives are reported plus the free space. This Autoruns when windows starts, so the drive is always on-line.

The Web Interface

When you plug in a drive, it presents it in the web interface as the native name and you get the option to rename this to something easier to remember. It then goes off and starts to process the drive contents and this on drives that are full of movies and music etc can take a LONG time. From this same interface you can share folders and files, you just pop in an email address and it sends the person a link though for movies for example, it has to transcode the file first so it can be played via the web browser and your upload will suffer if they start to pull movies from you.

Where it starts to go wrong

Let first go through facts and figures:

• The network interface was supplied a full gigabit network – this is faster then USB 2
• The drives in question are both linked to the pogoplug, so USB -> USB in theory
• The external drives are USB2

The first thing I tried to do was move some files from one drive to another using the windows interface, thats grab the folder and tell it to move the files.  At this point I got a windows error telling me I had no permission to do so. I could create files and folder, I could delete files and folders but I cannot move a file or folder from one drive to another.

What you have to do in this instance is Copy the stuff across then delete the folder, rather sloppy I am sure. This is where the next issue comes into play –  It told me this would take 55Minutes to copy 15.7GIG – HOW LONG???

The easy solution

In the example above, I found it easier and quicker to just plug in my drives to the machine, do the moving of files (which worked) and the time difference was same 15.7GIG took about 14 minutes (roughly). The same solution came when I wanted to format a drive, it was just easier to pop the drive on a windows box, format it and job done instead of having to delete all the files (which took forever it seems) via the pogoplug interface.

Expandability

The reason I went and splashed some cash on this pink box was a few reasons. The first was I already had various External USB Drives at hand with media on and this device meant I could spend a small amount of money (compared to a full blown NAS) and not only have all my external drives shared across the network but also the internet, imagine having access to all of my music on my phone – amazing.

The other reason was there is a growing community of applications and basically you can install a lot of different programs to run in the background and expand your pogoplug – call openpogo – this includes SAMBA for proper file and print sharing, a torrent downloader, webserver, MySQL Server and many more.

Thoughts in the early stages

Remember that I have only had a few hours to play with this device but I wanted to get my initial impressions out there for people who might be thinking about buying one. If I had bought a proper NAS Box and a couple of 1.5TB Drives – I would have spent 3x what this device cost me but ended off with a device that had a single plug and been a LOT faster at accessing files. I could have also plugged in my USB Drives and shared them too but that would have been the limit of that NAS Box solution for example.

I agree that in USB via the network in my own use generally is slow and the PogoPLug is no different. If you think about this though – once all your photos, music, movies and files are stored – then speed over the internal network should not be an issues. I tested the playback with some 1080p content and this worked without a single drop in frames or buffering.

Transcoding takes a LONG time – if you have a lot of video files that you may need to watch on your mobile device or share with others then expect to leave the box ticking away for months on end, I may do a few at a time and see how it goes. So far then – it seems a good buy, it just means I am leaving 4 USB Drives plugged in and powered up along with this device 24/7.

I am going to try and explain what I have learned over the many years of using many computers – to try and present what I feel is a good layout for your media so that you stop loosing important files by silly mistakes. While this is not the be all and end all of how to use a computer, it will help you stop having duplicates, needing to keep backing up multiple times and pay for services online.

The Single computer

If you have one computer and this one computer has only one drive, then I suggest you partition the drive so that it has a main C: Drive and another, much larger D: Drive that will hold all the data. On the C: Drive, you need to install your Windows, Office product and various other utilities – we shall call this the base build. I would suggest once you have this updated and the way you need it, I would invest in a external HD, a bootable CD (such as Ultimate Boot CD for Win) so that you can make an image of the HardDrive at this stage – the resulting image size should then not be too big. The beauty of the imaging aspect is that should the computer not work to plan months later, you can get the computer almost back to speed very quickly.

I mentioned a D: Drive – this can be used to install all the Games and various other media. If the machine then needs a complete rebuild, the D: Drive will remain intact each time provided you pick the right options of course.

More then one computer

If you have more then on computer and wish to share everything around, I shall explain how I have set up my computers with minimal cost on extra hardware.

The first stage was to get a Router that not only supported the N Standard (300mbps) but also had Gigabit Ethernet (4 ports). The reason for Gigabit is the sheer speed it can move data around and most of my computers have a GIgabit port already. From the router, this goes to a Gigabit Switch (5 port) – this is to take up the slack and allow all the computers on the network to have access to full Gigabit speed.

External Drives

Data storage for files such as movies, music and so forth do not need amazing speed and you have a choice of buying a normal (and very cheap) External Drive – 1TB Drives are now very cheap indeed. If you have a laptop spare, you can share the drive from the laptop running Windows or Linux and leave this tucked away in the background. The beauty of a Laptop is it will carry on running even if you have a power cut and will use the least amount of electricity and make no noise if left on.

Network Attacked Storage

If you happy to spend the money, you can buy a NAS Box (Network Attached Storage) which has a RJ45 connector and can also serve up iTunes, act as a Webserver and so forth. You can buy single drive versions (much cheaper), dual and so on. Remember that the price quoted online is often without drives unless they are single drive boxes and will be as expensive empty as a whole 1.5TB External USB Drive. The good thing about them is you can plug them into a network point and forget about them.

Storing Movies

As I own a WDTV device – I store all my movies across two drives at the moment, this been 1TB and 500GIG Iomega drives. This is sticking all your eggs in one basket though, if the drive fails – I loose the lot. The 1TB Drive is mostly BluRay movies though and as I only use the drive when watching on the TV – it should last a lot longer. I also happen to have a lot of movies also stored on DVD, so only involves copying them all should I loose them.

Central Storage

It makes sense from the above that I have my important media away from the main computer – this means even if I wipe this computer today, I loose none of my important data. I am a gamer and I get to know which games can be moved about and which require install to work, such as any EA Game for example.

In my example I have a Laptop which is running Windows 7 and connected to this is a 320 External Drive (USB) plus a 60Gig 2.5” External Drive plus the computer itself has a 160 Drive fitted. I store all my files I need to share out such as drivers, applications and such on this computer. As it is a laptop, it makes zero noise and does not need a screen open to see what is happening. I can use Remote Desktop built into windows to control the screen as required. I also happen to run Mangos (WoW Server) from there plus a Virtual Ubuntu Machine.

The rest of the computers

The other computers (apart from my main one) does not need big harddrives as it goes and they have either 120GIG drive or 250GIG drive – all they need is the OS and application installed – no storage of Data is required. As the Laptop is on 24/7 and acting a server, I can map a drive to each computer for easy access to the files.

Stop loosing data when formatting drives

Before SATA came along we only had IDE and this meant Master/Slave set up. Windows was happy with this and presented the Master as the first drive and the slave as the second. Once we add SATA to the mix, depending on the motherboard, this can mix up the order of the drives. For example on one of my machines, the IDE is always listed first while another lists the SATA as first.

I know from the past when using Norton Ghost and having two drives of the same size (and even make) can confuse the hell out of anybody. I have done what most probably has done and that is ghost an empty drive to a full drive – loosing the lot in the process.

The best remedy for this is a simple one and only needs some common sense – keep the DATA drive OUT of the computer until you have finished installing windows on the current drive. If you plug in the second drive and it fails to boot – a simple look in the BIOS can sort out the order in which it looks to boot drives.

Thoughts

While this is by no means the be all and end of of information or how to do things, I know I have not lost any major data for MANY years and nor have I reverted to using online back up services either. The OS you can get back, the Office 2007 you can also get back but the documents you have wrote, the pictures you created and such you cannot. Blank DVD are very cheap and most machines have such a device – use it..

One of my recent purchases was this Icy Box Docking Station for 2.3” + 3.5” HDD which features a SATA + USB Interface. I bought this one from Aria UK for £18. I already own a 3.5” SATA Drive bay which features USB & eSATA but did not have the eSATA Lead and there is no way I was going to spend loads on postage just for a cheap lead. Having a handful of loose 2.5” SATA Drives hanging about as well as some 3.5” Models plus the Dell I own having eSATA built in as standard – I was good to go.

Build and construction

The device does not feel cheap and is heavy enough to stay on the desk even without drives. It has two lights on the front, the blue circle light tells you it is on and the blue light underneath is the access light.

Around the back we have eSATA, USB, On/Off Switch and the power lead. You can only use one or the others (eSATA or USB) at a time. The top has a flap with a space for 2.5” drives to fit in. If you plug in a 3.5” Drive, the Flap goes down and this could be prone to breaking – I know we managed to break the one at work (different make) in the same day.

Using the device

I plugged the eSATA lead into the computer and the drive bay, powered on and booted Windows 7 64bit. No immediate sign of anything been installed come forth and I guess that made sense as the eSATA interface was already installed and working. I plugged in a Drive and again – nothing happened, I checked Disk Management, nothing in there – did I just get a broken device?

I went to device manager, right clicked and checked for new hardware and it found the drive itself (in this case a Toshiba) and going back to disk management presented me with a 80GIG drive to play with. As I had put Linux on this drive, it had no drive letters and such, so I had to re-partition and reformat – then it came up as Q Drive (I had picked that letter). I repeated the same with another 2.5” Drive – same thing as before but once all completed , the good thing was I could hot swap the drives at will.

Thoughts

I bought this device as I felt I needed to be swapping drives around and while a enclosed case works just fine, they are not suited to keep taking them apart. I can use this to image drives (Norton Ghost) for example and many other uses and I feel the price is worth the end product. eSATA by the way is way faster then USB or FireWire – by a long stretch.      

External Hard Drives normally comes with USB, sometimes Fire wire but on the rare occasion something called eSATA. Basically it goes like this in terms of speed:

USB 1.1 –> USB2  -> Firewire 400 –> Firewire 800 and finally eSATA which is the same speed as connecting the drive internally. I have not seen many FireWire 800 cases around and even FW400 commands a premium. Of course for the Mac User you have little choice, Apple have not got any eSATA connectors on any of there machines.

IOMEGA 500GIG USB2 Drive

Some time ago, I was looking around for a 500GIG Drive which I could plug into my iMac – I Was not that bothered about the colour as such but I wanted a Quiet Drive, one that never went to Sleep (and slowed down the machine when it had to spin up again) plus has 500GIG of Space to match my Internal Drive of the Mac. The price was right on the IOMEGA and at about £50 (which at the time was cheaper then online) and it was Silver so it matched the iMac.

Around the Back

The Drive is pure USB2 only, has a Power Switch and a small external power supply. The Drive can be placed flat or using the supplied holder – be placed vertically so it takes up the least amount of desktop space. The case is made of Aluminium which aids with the cooling so this keeps the drive quite – this saves having a noisy fan on the back (though it does have a fan in there).

Lights and thoughts

As you can see from the photo – it has a Blue LED which does light up the room if it is dark – this is where the handy on/off switch comes into play. The Drive does not go to sleep or if it does, it spins up pretty fast. The Interface inside is SATA and the drive itself is pretty slim compared to some model’s I have seen. I have not tested the speed but its not as fast as an internal of course as it’s limited by the USB2 interface. I would have bought a Firewire one but the cost of these for some reason is a lot more. I rate this drive over the other’s I have (320GIG Model) and would buy the same make again.