My geeky New Year resolutions for 2011 are the same as 2010 – back up my stuff, digitise content, clean out my computer and centralise my media.
At least this year, I have a few more tools to review and help me finally achieve this – namely a Drobo S, a Western Digital My Book Live external drive, an Eye-Fi Pro X2 memory card, iolo’s System Mechanic 10 software and the MiCorder.
Data Robotics sent me their latest Drobo S box to try out. It adds USB 3.0 support for faster data transfers, but as very few computers have USB 3.0 yet (expect to see the standard take off this year) and I did not have a USB 3.0 card to update my own PC, I was only able to try it with much slower USB 2.0 connectivity.
The Drobo S is a great backup solution, but is perhaps overkill for most people. Mine had five drive bays and came with three 1Tb drives to install and two 1.5Tb ones for 6 terabytes of storage space.
Set up was very easy, the drives just slotted in and were quickly recognised and formatted. Any standard drives can be used and can be “hotswapped” in and out of the black Drobo box.
The Drobo mirrors data backed up to the unit across the disks, so if one or more of the drives fails, a copy of your data will still be intact on the remaining ones. It all happens with the minimum of configuration by the user – so no need to read any manuals on how RAID works.
The downside is the cost – HP Direct is currently selling a Drobo S equipped with five 2Tb drives for $1800 – so this Drobo model seems really for heavy-data-using professionals, such as video editors, music producers and photographers.
The Drobo S also lacks an Ethernet port to make it a network drive, something I found very useful on Western Digital’s My Book Live.
I hooked up this 2Tb external drive, which sells for less than $200 in the US, to a router elsewhere in the house and used it for backup and the centralising and sharing of media such as music and videos with other computers, as well as for streaming video to the TV.
For a “cloud” solution for your own personal photos and videos, an Eye-Fi SD card will wirelessly enable your camera so that it automatically uploads photos and videos to specified folders on your home network and to services in the cloud as well, such as Flickr and Facebook.While I am a long-time user of Flickr, I preferred Eye-Fi’s own View service, launched in October, for automated mass storage of my photos and videos and easy sharing with friends and family – through email links that do not require a password.
The service is free for access to uploads over the last seven days and $50 a year for unlimited storage in the cloud.
While initially praising Windows 7 for its speedier start-up, I have found it is just as slow as previous Windows operating systems over time as I have added more and more programs.
To clean up and hopefully speed up my computer, I ran iolo’s System Mechanic 10 on New Year’s Day. It found 341 problems with my Windows registry, 3.35Gb of system clutter, 2 unnecessary startup items, 3 broken shortcuts, low memory and my settings not optimised for maximum internet speeds.
I was surprised at how quickly it fixed these problems – in less than 10 minutes – and a little encouraged by the results – start-up did seem a tad faster. But I remain sceptical about how much these kinds of programs can help – I am still going to have to resort to help on online forums to figure out why Microsoft Office and iTunes insist on reinstalling themselves every time I start them, for example.
This means one of the new features in this latest version of System Mechanic was of no help – Program Accelerator is supposed to automatically re-align all programs and their dependent files on a hard drive, so that, in making them contiguous, they will start faster.
System Mechanic’s CRUDD (Commonly Redundant or Unnecessary Decelerators and Destabilizers Remover™), which automatically identifies and classifies redundant programs, also lacked any helpful suggestions.
It found I had three browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Safari) besides Internet Explorer, for example, and offered to uninstall them, when I actually wanted to keep all three – as well as my two extra media players and three photo managers.
One feature, called Intellistatus, was useful though in allowing me to get under the hood to examine all programs running and easily disable ones I no longer needed – that gave me the biggest boost in startup speeds.
The MiCorder is a handy-sized device for digitising any kind of analogue content. It helps if the target content is being played on something with a standard headphone socket as the MiCorder comes with a standard male-to-male 3.5mm audio cable to connect from a headphone Out to its own Line In port .
Otherwise, there is a built-in microphone to hold up to speaker, although I would personally only use this for recording some 78s on my wind-up gramophone.
I found it most useful transferring old cassettes from a cassette player, using its headphone socket. I could connect it to a turntable for LP conversions, but only via an amplifier with headphone socket.
The MiCorder records content as an MP3 file at 128 kilobits per second, which provides decent quality. It saves the file to a standard SD card – ones up to 8Gb in size can be inserted.
I found it a little imprecise in catching the beginning and end of tracks when pressing the record button to start and stop recording. Putting the SD card into the card reader in my PC allowed me to transfer the tracks and import them into iTunes where I could rename them.
The MiCorder does not come with software to make this easier or to improve what’s recorded – I used the free Audacity program to clean up what I had recorded.
All in all, I felt it would have been quicker for my needs to directly link a source to the Line In on my PC or laptop and record and edit it with something like Audacity. So I find it hard to recommend the MiCorder, particularly as it seems a little pricey for what it is and does at $80.
