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SCSI based RAID level5... by capsteve · 2004-06-16 13:34 · Score: 1 · on Which RAID for a Personal Fileserver?

is the only choice for reliability, performance and cost effectiveness. yeah, you can build one for much cheaper using ATA/serial ATA, but for longevity and reliability, SCSI is still the best bet.

look for mylex raid controllers, or if your looking on ebay, consider CMD (5000 series or greater) as a fall back option. i don't recommend chapprel.

if you're gonna do it on the cheap consider the firewire raid solutions from wiebetech or granite digital.

Re:Old news by SlamMan · 2004-03-27 10:23 · Score: 0, Redundant · on Better Business Bureau Targets Apple's G5 Ads

Its the g5Jam from Wiebetech. Their sites down with 400 errors, but its a pretty neat product.

Re:Proof? by PygmySurfer · 2004-02-12 07:56 · Score: 1 · on Own a Piece of An Apple-Based Supercomputer

You could install an SATA card, and just stick drives anywhere there's free space in the case.

Or, you could get a G5 Jam.

Re:Internal Model? by Kris_J · 2004-01-14 12:39 · Score: 1 · on A Terabyte In A Cigar Box

Try this fairly small IDE-2-Firewire adapter. If bus power isn't enough to drive your preferred hard disk, you could solder up a 12V plug. Many modern motherboards have two Firewire ports as standard, many PCI Firewire cards have four with one internal. It wouldn't take much to hookup a TB inside a PC with this. Power consumption and heat might become a bit of an issue though.

Personally, My motherboard's got two IDE channels, two SATA ports, two Firewire ports and six USB2.0 ports, plus I've got two Firewire ports on my Audigy. I've got two drives in there already (totalling a massive 120Gig ;), but I shouldn't have any problems slowly upgrading to a TB if I wanted. Drives are quite affordable too. My system volume certainly needs an upgrade.

Hot swap enclosure by Anonymous Coward · 2004-01-14 01:43 · Score: 2, Informative · on Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?

Can't you stop being a cheapskate and just buy a proper hotswap enclosure?

If you can't afford that then a Firewire enclosure will be good enough for what you're trying to do. Make SURE to stop the device before unplugging it! You can buy Firewire dongle devices like the DriveDock from WiebeTECH as you'll be wanting to unplug and plug lots of drives.

Firewire by selacious · 2004-01-14 00:50 · Score: 3, Insightful · on Hot-Swapping IDE Drives?

Grab a IEEE1394 IDE bridge, preferably bus powered. Linux should support these devices and they are easily, externally hot-swappable. I've had success with the SuperDriveDock from Wiebetech, although there are certainly cheaper models out there.

In my case by djupedal · 2003-10-31 18:59 · Score: 1 · on Panther Eats FireWire 800 Drives

I have an external FW800 drive case[..:.. example...], with a 120gb Seagate. Connected to a 1.25GHz G4.

For the record, I've had no issues with Panther and this external drive. I checked the firmware, and it was the suspect 1.02.

Just to be on the safe side, I downloaded and applied the firmware update from WeibeTECH, again, with no issues.

Re:Apple motherboards kill firewire bridges by kgp · 2003-10-31 12:29 · Score: 1 · on Panther Eats FireWire 800 Drives

The usual thing that kills BOTH Apple motherboards and peripherals is CRAPPY worn out firewire CABLES.

The problem comes when the strain releif doesn't releive the strain (beware of twisting the cables especially on cheap firewire cables) and the power lines in the cable nail the PHY on the Firewire/IDE bridge board or the PHY on the motherboard.

Whenever you have a firewire problem that you think has killed either a drive or a motherboard SWAP OUT THE CABLE FIRST.

A sacrificial firewire hub or at the very least PCI card also helps trouble shooting.

And yes sometimes just waiting helps (if the self-resetting fuse has blown ...)

Wiebe has a great FAQ on this:

http://www.wiebetech.com/pressreleases/FireWirePor tFailures.htm

Reading it can save you a great deal of grief (for any platform user -- not just Macheads!).

Updates by dynayellow · 2003-10-31 05:36 · Score: 4, Informative · on Panther Eats FireWire 800 Drives

According to this Apple page the problem is with the chipset.

OWC has posted a firmware update for their drives, as has Wiebetech. It looks like the Wiebetech requires you to update the firmware in Jaguar, and then they don't recommend using it IN Jaguar afterwards... Sheesh.

Firewire is your friend. by dadragon · 2003-08-03 10:07 · Score: 1 · on Required Tools for PC Repair?

For various repairs I've had to do over the years, I've developed a nice toolkit that will handle anything I've seen so far.

* a firewire-ide bridge (here, look for firewire drivedock)
* an IDE cable
* a floppy cable
* a network cable
* several usb/serial/parallel cables
* a laptop with firewire and a cd burner, IE a Sony Viao or Apple iBook with windows or mac os and linux installed
* a hard drive full of cd images for various operating systems
* a hard drive full of windows updates/mac updates/updates for whichever UNIXy os you carry with you
* a phillips scredriver
* a slotted screwdriver
* a torx t9 and t8 screwdriver (for laptops)
* an external firewire drive to do backups
* a USB NIC (here's one)
* drivers for the aformentioned USB NIC.
* alternatively, a $10 PCI ne2000 NIC.
* a stack of cheap cds.
* a modem for your computer if it didn't come with one

I also use a Palm m515 with a serial cable and a program called pTelnet wich will act as a serial console program for Linux/BSD and non-free unix machines.

Re:Errr....am I missing the delete part? by tychay · 2003-07-25 09:08 · Score: 1 · on iTunes: Don't Leave Home With Them

No it doesn't. Once a sale is made, it is final. Reread what you just quoted: the sentence you emphasize applies to the service not the sale.

The guy in the article was trying to use the service of reauthorizing his music (after he deleted his authorization keys by reinstalled his computer from scratch) from a credit card he changed to a Canadian billing address (which Apple makes very clear during the sale cannot be used as a billing address for access to iTMS--not in fine print as the author implies).

Had he done any of the following, he wouldn't have any problems:

not deleted his authorization key from his computer by reinstalling from scratch;
backed up his hard drive with a tool such as Carbon Copy Cloner (this is very easy because a Powerbook can be mounted in target disk mode or you can back up to a bare 3.5" HD via a Drive Dock)
not changed his billing address to Canada; or
changes his billing information/credit card to one in the United States (having a friend forward mail, for instance).

Right now Apple uses the "technology" of billing address verification to verify compliance. The agreement is worded such that they have the freedom to use another technology whenever you try to use iTMS service (authorize or deauthorize a computer constitutes a service, listening to music sold to you, by my guess does not). They obviously will use this "technology" as long as they are not allowed to sell iTMS music in Canada.

This article sounded too pat to me. It's obvious from the agreement that iTMS is designed to behave the way it did. The writer seems to have gone to great extremes to find a scenario in which he couldn't listen to his music and is the internet equivalent to buying a CD, having it damaged by movers, and then being "shocked" when the music store he bought it from won't send him a new one. Because of this, I checked out the author's homepage: what do you know, it says he's a vice president of MusicDirect.Com (which seems to be a website making money from referrals to Amazon.Com music downloads)--an unfortunate conflict of interest. (I also noticed that he worked for Microsoft, but I believe this to be a red herring: it was their internet division and he left them during the internet boom.)

BTW, I must complement him on a well done homepage! A wiki and blogger: he's a pretty talented guy--talented enough to have a backup of his hard drive and worldly enough to scam a US-based credit card somewhere, no doubt. :-)

Shipping Laptops by zymurgyboy · 2003-07-10 14:35 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data

I work in a AmLaw top 100 law firm in DC. We do a lot of complex litigation work. We use software such as Concordance, Ringtail, and Litgator's Notebook (runs on Lotus Notes) to manage collections of documents. The documents are scanned to group IV tiff; the meta data and OCR text that is extracted from the documents at scan time is loaded into another database that overlays the images.

These tiff file collections run into the millions.

Of course the point of doing this is to facilitate collaboration on document review between us, our clients and our co-counsel. These people are often 1000s of miles apart, and nearly as often have crap for IT resources (equipment and personnel).

There are ways of accessing this stuff over the internet securely but it's never quite the same as having the real version of the software. This form of access often proves to be impractical for the lawyers who travel alot depending on the type of access they can get wherever they end up.

So what often happens is, we end up dumping the entire collection on a laptop with a big hard drive or a bigger firewire or USB drive, so they can work without access to the internet and then replicate changes when they can get the laptop back on ethernet or a POTS line.

Collections of images and databases (not to mention the various Power Point presentations and word processing files) can very easily run over 50GB. Moving this across the LAN, over my PC BUS to another hard drive and then FEDEXing it is certainly faster than doing the same transfer using FTP or SCP. Not to mention, that way I can install the software (properly) and test the whole setup before I send it off. The extra wear and tear I save on my psyche from NOT having to explain how to install all of the software, point it to the image collections, and deal with equipment I have no control over while being screamed at by extreme Type A attorneys going to trial makes that laptop look like a pretty good investment.

These are good if you have someone on the other end of your FEDEX run who know how to open the case on a PC and install a HD themselves. I can setup one machine with everything, image the hard drive, make copies on other drives and drop them into FEDEX pouches as fast as I can make 'em. I can't think of a faster way to move a few 100 GBs of stuff to a half dozen places inside of a day. If someone has ideas, I'm all ears.

Re:I thought up something like this... by henele · 2003-04-03 04:18 · Score: 1 · on USB Floppy Disk Drive RAID Array Under OS X

I wanted to make a huge RAID of USB flash memory "Keys". If it weren't for the worthless speed you get out of USB 1.1, it could be quite cool.

You could use Wiebetech's firewire flash/microdrive keychain, maybe even on multiple firewire buses, but for size/performance ratios disk-only ipod-like units are usually going to win.. Daisy chaining them all around your monitor or something though would look cute :)

It was demonstrated at the MacWorld Expo by MichaelCrawford · 2003-02-01 09:29 · Score: 2, Interesting · on The Always-Encrypted Firewire Hard Drive

WiebeTech demonstrated FireWire Encrypt working at the MacWorld Expo.

It uses software to allow the user to enter their passphrase from the keyboard. By the time of the expo, I had got the AES encryption working in the FireWire/IDE bridge but had only done the passphrase application for Mac OS X.

I've since got it working for Mac OS 9 (and earlier Mac OS versions). Windows and Linux remain before the product can ship. I don't expect either to be hard to do but they do require some work because they have to do some raw FireWire I/O.

I think it is best that I not comment any beyond this until FireWire Encrypt ships. But I think users will like what they see.

"Firewire Encrypt" sounds much more interesting by Jeremy+Erwin · 2003-02-01 08:15 · Score: 1 · on The Always-Encrypted Firewire Hard Drive

A few days ago, I read in MacCentral that Weibetech had developed a AES based system to encrypt hard drives.

WiebeTech has 1394b too by MichaelCrawford · 2003-01-09 13:04 · Score: 5, Informative · on Slashback: Embed, Dougal, FireWire

Here are articles about WiebeTech's announcement of 1394b support:

WiebeTech also now supports ATA-6 (large IDE drives) in its FireWire bridge product line.

(WiebeTech is my consulting client. I did the firmware and user interface for FireWire Encrypt).

FireWire Encrypt at WiebeTech Booth 1651 by MichaelCrawford · 2003-01-07 09:13 · Score: 2 · on All-New PowerBooks, Web Browser Featured at Macworld

My client WiebeTech LLC is demonstrating FireWire Encrypt at booth #1651 at the show.

It is a sector-level hard drive encryptor that aims to be very easy to use as well as portable. It uses the Advanced Encryption Standard's Rijndael Algorithm.

It is easy to use because the only software the user needs to install is a simple applet that allows entry of the passphrase. There is no complicated operating system-level software to install or configure.

The encryption implementation itself is entirely contained within a FireWire to IDE bridge.

The FireWire connection also makes the product portable, because FireWire is an external hot-pluggable serial bus.

MacCentral covers the FireWire encrypt here. You can read WiebeTech's press release about it in Microsoft Word format here.

I issued a press release (my first ever!) to annouced that I developed the software for WiebeTech. I posted the press release at http://www.wiebetech.com/press/. Sorry I just have Word format available at the moment, but I will post it in HTML in a little while. I'm tired!

I have more technical details on the product in my Kuro5hin diary.

WiebeTech is demonstrating FireWire Encrypt working with Mac OS X at the show, but we plan to support the product on Windows, Linux and classic Mac OS by the time the product is released to the public. (I personally run Slackware on my x86 box and Debian on my PowerPC Macintosh 8500).

Thank you for your attention.