jamerson9

Just took one of these apart. It's not too bad to open, there is an easily found youtube video that should you how to open one up. I got the case cleanly open using a paint scraper and plastic card to lever the tabs. However, the inside metal shroud/case is attached by screws which are in turn covered by rubber pads which are glued/sticky taped on. This part wasn't shown on the video unfortunately. So, even if you could get the case off without breaking any tabs, unless you can seamlessly replace the glue/sticky pad, it is going to leave a tell-tale sign that the drive has been removed.

Given that external 3TB are cheaper than internal OEMs, I decided to gamble on two to upgrade parity and add capacity. I've only used external drives as off site backups so I've never really had them always on for really extended periods and as most hdd utilities can't get SMART data off usb drives I've never really had a reading of the temperature. By feel, they all seem to be running on the hot side, but didn't give much thought to it as I turned them off as soon as the backups finished. We'll I'm currently preclearing the newly bought 3TB in their external cases (not going to take them out until they pass preclear for return reasons) for under an hour and their temperatures are already 54C! And still climbing. I'm trying to find an old desk fan I have somewhere to get some airflow over the drives and see if it helps. The drives in the server case never goes above 38C. So this is a bit alarming. From the segate's faq (http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193771en?language=en_US) the normal operating temperature should be between 5-50C with some new drives up to 60C. Given this, I'm not really surprised by the numerous feedbacks of quickly dying external drives. Anyone know of a Windows or OS X utility that can monitor or get SMART info from a drive in a external USB case? If my other externals backup drives getting that hot, I'm thinking of ripping them out of their original cases and jury mounting them in some old metal SCSI external cases with built in fans.

Do any of these tools do md5sums on the files? neofinder and abemeda have a md5 checksum function. I've never used it as I use it to just search for files.

I use neofinder (mac) and AbeMeda (PC), the demo versions of these can do up to 10 catalogs, which is more than the number of shares I have. Can also schedule updates and is very fast at indexing. Most tempting if I had to spurge out (well over kill for me) is spaceobserver by Jam-soft (the maker of treesize). It can tracks the growth and change of your data.

I'm currently using the free Hamachi mesh VPN from logmein given how easy it was to setup on four different OSs and without having to make an account on their site. But, when I get a new router I will be moving to DDWRT VPN. The free version looks to be on the way out given they have reduced the number of machine on a single VPN to 5 and how hard they have made it to find information on the free mesh version. Another draw back is that it is slow, didn't matter that much when my home connection was slow, but with a faster connection it is now noticeable.

Really depends on how much effort you wish to put into it. I went with high water in the beginning with couple of empty drives. Didn't like having files all over the place so after some tidying about went with writing to the disk shares directly. I now tend to fill up and close up drives with permanent stuff and leave one drive for temporary data.

I use Plex over 3G and feel that cellular bandwidth is more of a bottle neck than my home upload. It works pretty well when I am stationary with a good signal. $5 seemed to be very good bargain, given all the consistent work they have been putting in and free desktop clients that drives my home TV.

Very nice!

Thank you for the nightly release, it will save me the bother of having to mux in HD audio track back in. I'll report back if there is any problems with it.

I would appreciate if you could compile a newer snapshot. I've read that they now have better HD audio support that was not supported in 0.9.5. TIA.

Thanks. The SATA Cables are from www.monoprice.com (another great site I learned about from this forum). They are KGear GC18AKM SATA3 cables. I ordered them color-coded. Red = Data Blue = Parity Black = Cache Dang! That's a nice idea. Next time when I need more cables, I'll see if I can order a rainbow set.