Stuart Herbert

After my earlier disappointment with the StarTech disk caddies, I ordered a couple of IcyDock caddies to see if they were any better. And the initial answer is a resounding “yes”. Hopefully I’ll find more time tomorrow night to explain why.

It’s just too hot tonight to sit down and concentrate on Gentoo stuff. It’s so hot that the glue holding Kristi’s trebuchet together melted!

I ordered two hard drive caddies yesterday, and they arrived today. They’re the first parts to go into the case.

One of the important things about fitting drive caddies is being able to easily get at the screw holes on both sides of the 5.25″ drive bays, so that the caddies can be properly secured. The CoolerMaster Stacker case sides both pop off (and back on!) very easily, which is nice. As the drive caddies are for PATA IDE drives, I’ve put them down at the very bottom of the case, so that the ribbons will be as near to the motherboard’s IDE ports as possible. However, I’ve discovered that the screw holes for the bottom drive bay in the Stacker case are partially obscured by the case frame. My normal screwdriver was simply too fat to fit in the gap

The caddies themselves are a pair of StarTech Value IDE Removable Drive Drawers, model no DRW110ATABK. I deliberately bought bottom of the range - these cost me just over £10 each. And at the moment I’m in two minds about them.

It’s great that the caddies come with all the screws that you could need. Unfortunately, I found them to be quite soft, and I managed to damage the heads of every single screw just using a normal hand-held screwdriver. If I was looking to fit a lot of these quickly, using a powered screwdriver, I’d be concerned about whether the screw heads would survive.

The other problem is that I managed to break one of the enclosures the very first time I tried slotting in a caddy. The enclosures have two plastic tabs at the top. The caddy has a lever which slots under these tabs. The tabs aren’t very strong, and when I tried to close the lever with the caddy not seated firmly, the plastic level snapped the tab right off. It doesn’t look like the tabs are essential for securing the caddies in their bays (fortunately!) but we’ll have to see.

Would I order more of these caddies? Probably not. StarTech make an all-metal alternative, but I’d be concerned both about the total cost of fitting 11 of these, and the fact that they’re ATA133. It’s one thing to replace £60 worth of drive caddies when ATA133 drives disappear off the market; it’d be another thing altogether to replace £550 worth! StarTech do make a SATA I range of enclosures, but SATA II drives are starting to appear, and they don’t list a UK distributor for their top of the line aluminium version.

The only affordable alternative I could find this evening is the Icy Dock range of enclosures. They do an aluminium SATA enclosure which costs less than £20. That’s cheap enough to make it possible to write off the enclosures when SATA II becomes the common type of drive. I’m going to get a few of these caddies ordered, and see what they’re like.

I have three hobbies which really eat up disk space (and I’m not talking about Gentoo here I’ve kept something like 7,000 photos that I’ve taken in the last year or so (and I haven’t had a proper holiday in that time either …). When I remember to take the camcorder along, I shoot as much footage as I can when I train with Rob. I can never keep up with everything he’s pointing out during class! And I write and record music (something I haven’t done enough of for a couple of years now). Now that the wife has a Nikon of her own, I’m going to need even more storage.

It has to be online storage. Kristi uses the photo archive as reference material for her paintings. It has to be resilient - I don’t want to lose data because of a disk failure. And it has to be backed up - it’s too easy to accidentally delete data, or for a buggy app to do so on your behalf

I could buy a NAS box, plug it in, and job done. But that just seems too easy, and far too boring So the plan is to put something together myself to do the job, using Gentoo as the base O/S of course Hardly a difficult job, but something that I can have some fun with.

The first thing I need is the right case. A NAS box is going to need lots of disks - 2 for the O/S, and at least 6 for the data. Over the lifetime of the machine, those disks are going to fail and need replacing. I’ve recently been having to replace a few dead disks in my existing boxes, and having to disconnect IDE ribbons and remove motherboard power connectors just to get the disks out of the bays … it’s just unnecessary effort really. What I want is a case with lots of 5.25″ bays, which I can fit drive enclousures into. When a disk fails, just pull out the draw, pop out the old drive, pop in the new one, close the draw. I shouldn’t have to remove the case cover for a failed disk.

I already own two derelict full-tower cases, which are just wasting space in the upstairs library at home. They have plenty of drive bays, and they were great in the days when I used SCSI drives. But IDE ribbons tend to be a lot shorter - and are limited to just two drives per cable. The top drive bays are just too far away from the motherboard (and even further away from any additional IDE controllers on PCI cards). Not my first choice for practicality.

What I really want is a case where the 5.25″ bays are as close to the motherboard as possible. I settled on CoolerMaster’s Stacker case. It has the bays that I want where I want them - all 11 of them. Mine arrived this morning, and is now sat downstairs in the lounge waiting for me to move it out of Kristi’s way.

Can’t do any more with it this month (already paid for our holiday this month, doesn’t leave a lot for toys!), but next month’s job is to take a trip down City Road and pick up a PSU, mobo, CPU, RAM … and some disks.

… then do whatever you have to do to go and see him perform. Especially if you play guitar or mandolin yourself. I’m not even remotely a fan of country music, but when he played the Muni here in Pontypridd last month, my jaw was on the floor. He was, head and shoulders, the most technically perfect performer I’ve ever had the joy to watch live - and Herb Pederson accompanying him came a very close second. It really was stunning to see someone play live at that level. I’ve seen some great gigs where the performers they were playing out of their skins for the gig of their life, but Chris Hillmand and Herb Pederson looked like they could do turn up and do that all night every night.

I’ll go as far as saying that I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if I never see anyone perform live at that level again. That’s how good I think he is.

Still no idea what he was doing playing the Muni in Pontypridd tho. I figure he got lost or something