The Adventures of Daniel Kwan

Wanglaoji is badass for putting random cheerleaders in my area for people to gawk at. Thank you, Wanglaoji! Anyway, on to unrelated complaints.

1. The connection to my web server is still awful. I’ve reverted the photography page back to the way it was. The connection’s too poor to work on it.
2. My bathroom has been smelling like a Beijing hutong public restroom. The smell comes and goes, but it sucks. I always flush, and my aim is just fine, so it’s not me.
3. Lately it’s been impossible to maintain a comfortable water temperature for showering. I keep having to rinse myself in the few seconds before it gets too hot or too cold.
4. I have 100 RMB banknotes stashed at my place, and so far I’ve come across two fake ones. These came from the fucking bank!!! I’ve lost $30 USD because the bank gave me fake money.
5. I’ve been doing sit-ups, but I still have love handles! I may have to start jogging in this muggy Shanghai weather.

I miss California.

(Source)

I’ve disabled the photography link because I’m redoing the photography section, but the connection to my host server has been so slow these past several days that I haven’t been able to make any progress. I wanna kill some Fuwas.

People say the stupidest things when talking about cars or photography.

Ugh.

I redid my photography page. All the images on that page now load from my website’s server rather than Flickr, so people in China (like me!) should be able to see them now. I also removed all the unnecessary text, like “Studio Portraiture / These are portraits taken in a studio.” There are 33 images currently, but whenever I feel like it I’ll probably add or remove or replace some.

SATA connectors inside the AMS Venus T5

As I mentioned before (here and here), I got an eSATA 5-bay external hard drive enclosure to replace my existing FireWire enclosures, and to house a backup. It’s called an AMS Venus T5 DS-2350S, a name that means nothing to me, but it’s relatively cheap and the reviews for it on Newegg are pretty good – mostly 4 out of 5.

I went from this mess:

to this box just slightly bigger than a 2-slice toaster:

It comes with everything, except an eSATA ExpressCard for laptops. For desktops it comes with a 2-port eSATA PCI-E controller.

hard disk tray

screws included *

lever to help move disk into SATA connectors

I don’t know what the included Windows software is for, but on a Mac, you just set up the disks the same way you set up any disk through Disk Utility. To make RAID or JBOD sets, go into the RAID menu. There you can choose to create a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1), Striped RAID Set (RAID 0), or Concatenated Disk Set (JBOD).

Mac OS X Disk Utility

If you don’t know what RAID is, you can google it or just don’t worry about it. I think most people won’t ever need it. JBOD on the other hand is simple. It’s Just a Bunch Of Disks that together make one drive. I use two JBOD volumes in my setup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup one volume to the other.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Why not Drobo?

The Venus T5 took me a total of maybe 15 minutes to get up and running, and that’s because I’m slow. There’s really nothing to it. You screw the trays onto the disks, insert the disks, plug in everything and format the disks. I suppose Drobo saves you a few minutes since you just insert the disks and it does the rest, but Drobo is $500 and this Venus T5 was $210 (price went up since I got it).

Drobo protects your data in case of a disk failure. That’s a good feature only for people who don’t do backups. If you do regular backups, you’re already protected from disk failure. The price difference between these two enclosures can get you a 1 TB hard disk to backup everything.

And of course, the thing that boggles the mind, Drobo uses USB interface only. I mean, seriously? The thing holds four hard disks and transfers data through USB. USB slow. FireWire fast. eSATA fastest. T5 FTW!

Issues

It’s not perfect though. Every time I plug in the T5 (sounds like a Terminator name), these annoying messages pop up:

Disk Insertion (screenshot)
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

Device Removal (screenshot)
The device you removed was not properly put away. Data might have been lost or damaged. Blah blah blah.

I just click on Ignore and OK, or let the messages go away by themselves after a few seconds. They seem to be false alarms because the drives show up and work just fine, and I didn’t remove any devices.

I bet they have to do with my JBOD setups. Maybe when I turn on the enclosure, the computer sees five disks which aren’t usable, hence “not readable”. And then they disappear because they’re actually JBOD sets, so the computer thinks they were removed. Just guessing though, I really have no idea.

Another complaint I have is that the fans are frikkin loud! They don’t change speeds depending on the temperature. There’s just a switch on the back with a low and high setting, and they’re loud and louder.

They could have made the low setting lower. Even after transfering data for hours, the box stays totally cool. When it’s summertime I’m gonna turn the thing around and point the fans my way.

Final thoughts

Honestly I ended up with the T5 because I was considering getting a Drobo, which has been mentioned in numerous prominent photography websites. Then I started reading about problems with Drobo, such as speed, proprietary file system, and not accepting hard drives that are perfectly fine. Just look through it’s own forums.

So I went looking for an alternative that’s compact and uses FireWire. Well it turns out FireWire enclosures are generally more expensive than eSATA enclosures, so I went with eSATA which is faster anyway.

I’ve only been using the T5 for a couple days but so far so good. I read about people having eSATA problems with OS X 10.5 Leopard, even with the latest version 10.5.2, but someone somewhere (discussions.apple.com I believe) mentioned that there’s only problems when the enclosure uses eSATA plus another interface, like USB. The T5 is eSATA only, and aside from those messages popping up, I haven’t had any problems.

* In the photo of the hard disk with the tray attached, I used the round head screws that came with the disk instead of the flat head ones that came with the Venus T5. You have to use flat head screws or the disks won’t fit in the enclosure.

Some of my external drives.

If you do a lot of photography or video projects, please don’t make the same mistake I made by buying one external hard drive after another.

First of all, they only stack up neatly if you buy the same brand and model enclosure every time. But you’re not gonna do that because better enclosures come out and old ones go obsolete.

Secondly, you don’t want to have a bunch of FireWire cables and power cords running all over the place. Trust me, that Matrix/sci-fi look isn’t worth the trouble.

The best way to go is to get a multi-bay enclosure, meaning an external enclosure that takes multiple hard drives. No, not Drobo. Drobo is way too slow if you’re moving gigabytes all the time. But you don’t need a $6000 Xserve RAID either.

Heck I don’t even think you should use RAID at all, any kind of RAID. In a media archive that just keeps getting bigger, you don’t need the extra speed from RAID, expanding is more difficult with RAID, and having a backup on a separate drive already protects you against a hard drive failure.

My new toy.

I purchased an eSATA enclosure with five HDD bays (pictured above), but I can’t use it because my eSATA ExpressCard hasn’t arrived yet. I plan on making two JBOD volumes inside the enclosure – one for the main archive and one for the nightly backup. When one volume gets full, I’ll replace a disk to expand it and copy everything over from the other volume.

Same thing if a disk goes bad. If one disk in a JBOD volume goes bad, the whole volume is gone, but I’d still have a backup to copy everything over when I replace the bad drive.

I’ll write more about this when I have everything set up. Just waiting on that ExpressCard. I used Amazon’s free shipping so who knows when it’ll arrive. Hopefully tomorrow.

If you’re unfamiliar with RAID, JBOD, and eSATA, go google them yourself. I’m too lazy right now.

I had a blog called Advice for Noob Photographers where I kept telling people not to become professional photographers, but I don’t update it anymore. It was too depressing. I’ll copy some articles over to this blog sometime.

For better advice about becoming a pro photographer, head over to Ken Rockwell’s website. He recently wrote an article titled How to Afford Anything, which of course caught my attention because I can’t afford nothing (except right now because I’m in China, where I can afford noodles). The article is geared toward photographers, as is the rest of his site. After reading the article, I felt a lot better about never buying flowers for my woman.

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As you may or may not know, I’m currently in Shanghai. Partly why I haven’t been updating this blog is that I’m enjoying my time away from the computer. Another reason is I can’t concentrate. I’m staying with my woman and I’m sorry but when I’m writing, I need my surrounding to be quiet! Or at least void of words. Or, at the very least, void of words directed at me.

But the main reason is I’m not sure why I should update it. It’s not that there’s nothing to write about. I’m on the other side of the world, and there’s a lot I can share, but why? What exactly does keeping this blog updated do for me aside from chew up time? When Lisa asked me why I update it, the best answer I could come up with was that I’ve been doing this for about 10 years.

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The more I learn about the business of photography, the less I want to be part of it. I’ve said I’m getting out of it before and ended up getting back into it, but now I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be my career. (If you’re interested in becoming a professional photographer, you’re at the wrong blog. Try these instead: A Photo Editor, Photo Business News, Photopreneur.)

First of all, I don’t like being a salesman, but professional photography (stock, commercial, wedding, doesn’t matter) is more of a sales job than anything else. That’s something I should have known from the very beginning. I have enough previous experience in sales to know that to be good at it, it has to be major part of your life, 24/7, and I’m not willing to make that kind of commitment (or sacrifice, actually). In fact I’m pretty much antisocial so selling myself really goes against my nature.

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I love the iPhone’s camera and WiFi capability. Those features are the main reasons I got the iPhone. I can now take a photo and publish it on the web immediately. (If you didn’t know, the iPhone’s camera is pretty nice.) This is going to come in very handy when I go to Shanghai later this month.

Like I told someone else, I feel like a little kid again with this camera (er… phone). I have another compact camera too but to share its photos, I’d have to plug it to the computer, download the photos, and then upload the photos. Too inconvenient and not worth the effort, so I never did it. But now it’s super easy.

I’ve created a photography moblog (or mobile photography blog, which I’d shorten and call a mofo blog if mofoblog.com wasn’t already taken) just for sharing photos from my iPhone. Take a look: PhotogMoblog.com. Barely any words. Just photos.