How To Spot A Psychopath

Apropos my previous post about file hosting services, the perfect repository for at least some big files occurred to me.

Wikimedia Commons!

And so…

Behold!

It’s a 1200dpi scan of a 5.25 inch hard drive controller board, from this scanner review from almost eight years ago. The board is of course rather older than that; it’s from the days before surface mount (OK, nitpickers, before everything was surface mount), when electronics took up more room and looked much cooler.

That cheap little scanner did a quite commendable job. Not quite 1200 whole dots per inch of detail, but still a whole lot of it in this 66 megapixel (!) image. Which ought to be quite enough for anybody’s desktop wallpaper.

If you’ve got some giant image, sound or video file that meets Wikimedia’s rather loose requirements, you can upload it to the Commons and be reasonably sure that it’ll be speedily available to the world for the foreseeable future.

The one caveat, of course, is that uploaded content must be covered by one or another free-use license. That rules Commons out for the 1337 w4r3z and pr0n that comprise most of the data uploaded to file-dump sites, unless you expend an unreasonable amount of effort in hiding your pirated content in something legit, and then hope they don’t notice that myadorablekitten.jpg is 702Mb in size.

There are various other stock photo repositories out there; Morguefile is a good one, and you can share big images on Flickr as well if you pay for an account (otherwise the biggest dimension of your pictures is limited to 1024 pixels).

I thought I’d stick with the big guns for this image, though, because it’s 12 freakin’ megabytes.

(Actually, the original was even bigger. This is my second attempt - I uploaded the original untweaked scan first just to see if Wikimedia would barf on the file size, then made this prettier, slightly smaller version that benefits from some Photoshop features introduced over the last eight years. Since my Wikimedia account is younger than four days - Wikipedia and Wikimedia accounts are separate - I can’t replace the old one with the new one, so I uploaded the new one as a separate file.)

Uploading your backups to FTP sites may be the really studly way to do it, but for this one niche - unreasonably large pictures of things that belong to you - Wikimedia looks pretty cool.

I hope to see many more scans of improbable objects there in the near future.

David, from Western Australia, writes:

During my daily trawl across the more interesting places on the net, I encountered this little device, as I’m sure you have.

Naturally, I was interested… until I saw the bloody price. I could build my own happy little 1.5Tb RAID box for the cost of that thing and still have change left over.

But it did bring something to light. Its storage mechanism seems intriguing, for as much I like RAID, I hate sacrificing to the parity god, especially if I’m using 500Gb drives.

Which got me thinking. This Drobo thingummy seems to be an expansion of JBOD with some kind of parity calculator. Now granted, the implementation of this in a shiny box is reason you pay for this thing, however my question as it were is this:

Have you ever encountered a method of implementing this on a PC? I’ve done a bit of hunting and come up with squat, but I do remember you writing about JBOD related things on several occasions, so I turn to you as a font of knowledge, oh mighty Dan.

The Drobo box does indeed look like an interesting little thing, and certainly seems to be a step toward the home mega-storage Nirvana I’ve written about before. But it has its limitations, chief among which is exactly the same Parity God sacrifice you’d make with a do-it-yourself RAID rig.

If you only read the glossy main Web site, all you’ll find is that the manufacturers allege that their storage scheme uses “advanced storage concepts such as virtualization, but it is not a derivative of RAID”. Well, who knows what the heck it is, then, but it’s clearly doing something analogous to parity RAID, otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to yank a drive and upgrade it any time you liked. So, obviously, all of the data on any given disk must be reconstructable from the content of the other disks, and the amount of capacity offered up to the Parity God must be at least as much as the size of the biggest disk.

Drobo aren’t really hiding this, though; their knowledge base confirms it. I suppose the thing could theoretically offer more capacity if it did real-time compression, but that’d make it hilariously slow and not gain much for the kinds of files that many Drobos are probably going to end up containing, anyway.

So if you add a 1000Gb drive to a Drobo that already has three 500Gb drives in it (ignoring real-gigabytes versus drive-manufacturer-gigabytes for now), you’ll take your aggregate capacity from 1000Gb to 1500Gb. If you’ve got four 500Gb drives in your Drobo and swap one of them for a larger one, the actual capacity won’t increase at all!

So I suppose it’s basically working like RAID 4, but with support for dissimilar disks.

As with normal RAID, if you change the drive setup your Drobo may be churning away for hours. And, just like a rebuilding RAID array, a disk loss during this period will poleaxe the entire array. The Drobo does, however, have battery backup to prevent a mere mains interruption from clobbering your data. So you should factor the price of a UPS into your equivalent-PC calculations.

In answer to your actual question, no, I don’t know of any remotely user-friendly way of doing this same sort of thing on a PC. FreeNAS could be a thing if you don’t want to take the more traditional route of pirating a really expensive version of Windows, but plug-and-go it ain’t.

Drobo really are quite straightforward about these capacity issues, though, including the powers-of-two versus powers-of-ten capacity rip-off. The knowledge base makes clear that four “500Gb” drives will only give you 1397 formatted gigabytes.

(It’s also a neat hack that the thing reports 2Tb capacity no matter what drives you actually install in it.)

In answer to another of my immediate questions about the thing, it is also apparently possible to swap drives from a dead Drobo into a new one. But there is of course no way to read Drobo disks on anything else. Software RAID (and, in theory, quality hardware RAID controllers) gets around this vendor lock-in problem, but for home users it’s not that big a deal, if of course you make backups. Which home users don’t.

Oh, and as someone else has noticed, the Drobo site tagline currently says “whose” where it ought to say “who’s”. That’s the kind of attention to detail you love to see from a storage vendor, isn’t it?

I-Wei’s been busy lately.

“The remarkable thing about a dancing bear steam-powered radio-controlled R2-D2 is not how gracefully it dances…”

This year’s Lego sets will include some pretty nifty stuff. The stand-out for your average kid will, I hope, be the new Castle sets featuring such things as dudes firing flaming spears at undead horsemen (on undead horses!). But those of us who will not rest until we’ve faithfully reproduced a 100% self-aware Johnny Five in Technic will be intensely interested in the new tank-track pieces, to be seen in sets 8272 and 8275 (featuring IR remote control!).

The older, narrower black tracks, as seen in classic Technic sets like the 8851 Excavator and 856 Bulldozer, are relatively delicate, because their central chain part has to mesh with standard Technic gears. And they’re not cheap, either - 15 cents a piece doesn’t sound like much, until you realise that your fantasy crane or Shuttle Transporter or whatever needs sixty US bucks worth of treads even if you assume you’re never going to break any of those dinky little hook connectors.

The new tracks, like the very old chain links that engaged the ancient peg gears, have a coarser drive gear pitch (and, therefore, new special drive gears), and should therefore be tougher.

But nobody really seems to care about that very much, because they’ve all immediately started perverting the new parts into weird and wonderful contraptions.

The heck of it is, though, that people keep coming up with brand new things to do with parts that’ve been around for ten or twenty years.

Like the old chain parts, for instance. Check this out. Do not miss the movie.

And, to give a more abstract example, how about spheres made out of radar dishes?

(This is from the same dude who came up with the most famous Lego sphere technique, which breaks free from the constraints of the obvious shape. It’s been expanded into various creations by others.)

I can’t quite pin down the exact part for the things on the bottom of the dish-sphere, by the way; they’re close to these hair clips (I envy those who don’t know about Lego’s “girl products”…), but they’re not the same.

A useful function for this clip has yet to be found. It slightly suggests a tentacular mouth.

Very Honourable Mention: This.