Ever since Geekbrief.TV host Cali Lewis demo’d the very simple-to-use Data Robotics Drobo ($499 MSRP) storage system as it was introduced in early 2008 at Macworld Expo San Francisco, I’ve followed the product’s evolution cycle with great curiosity. Imagine for a moment a self-managing high-speed data array with simplified RAID-like qualities, all in a handsome, compact enclosure– AND easier to use than an iPod Shuffle! Does the Drobo actually deliver all this awesome-sauce? Well, for the most part yes, at least in this first chapter of my product review– I’ll explain later. Note: At the time of this writing, Data Robotics has unveiled the big brother to the Drobo line: The eight-bay, rack-ready DroboPro.

Slick packaging

Data Robotics takes a page from Apple when it comes to packaging: Quite slick. It’s not the same fit and finish that Steve Jobs would be proud of but you can tell this company pays attention to subtle details. Speaking of details, the Drobo is built solid with a metal finish and a magnetic faceplate that pops snug into place. Data Robotics was nice enough to include both a USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 cable to connect the device to a host system. For our use we kept the FireWire cable and shelved the USB one, since its really only useful for “dumb” devices like printers, mice, and non-DMA intensive data stores.

The Drobo’s front housing has the drive bays with four simple eject latches and some indicator lamps. Four lamps, one beside each drive bay, are lit either green, yellow, or red depending on the health and capacity of the respective inserted drive. Below the drive bays are some simple status lamps and a row of lights which indicate the total used space of the storage array. Beyond that there isn’t much more to monitor and the short summary of directions is printed right on the inside of the magnetic faceplate. As Cali Lewis said on the demo video, “that’s as technical as it gets!”

I have to admit, you can’t really just plug this thing in and go crazy sans user manual. It’s not an iPod Shuffle, folks! There are some important details to note during installation, one of which will affect your long-term workflow, so you’ll want to unwrap the instruction booklet that most DIY buffs toss aside.

Adding drives

One installation screen casually asks to what capacity should the Drobo be formatted, and this one stumped me for a second. Based on the selections, it became obvious that my choice would affect future usage when adding storage.

The Drobo can be formatted virtually to simulate total storage capacity of 2, 4, 8, and 16 terabytes. Yes, even if you only bought two 120 GB drives. The implication here is that if you choose say, 2 TB as the volume capacity, the Drobo will cap that initial “chunk” at 2 TB and split the remainder of the virtual space into another volume. This may be a necessary option for some users as their operating system may not be able to address a device larger than that. If you have a fully 64-bit OS like Mac OS X, this isn’t a problem. However, Data Robotics makes it clear in all its FAQs and during installation that larger virtual volumes require more time to prep and protect on-the-fly. At the top-end (16 TB), volume preparation is said to take 15-30 minutes, a far cry from the mere moments demonstrated by Cali Lewis. If you don’t mind have multiple volumes with a maximum capacity of 2 TB each, choose the smallest size on the installation screen slider. It should be quick to format and faster to update if you swap drives a lot (for what reason, I can’t imagine).

For our use, I chose the 16 TB maximum volume size because we envision rarely needing to swap out drives (except in cases of capacity or drive failure). The lengthy setup time of about 15 minutes was bearable because in the long run I don’t want to hunt down b-roll video clips across multiple mounted volumes.

Speed

Okay let’s get down to business: how fast is this unit and is my data really safe? Most benchmarks don’t give me data I can translate to real world usage so I set out with my usual workflow.

35-50 MB/sec read and write speed over FireWire 800. There, that’s all there is to say! In my tests (which are by no means scientific) the Drobo will push about this much data over your 800 Mbps connector to your local computer. The only thing I will note is that I was moving very large files back and forth between the Drobo and a MacBook Pro internal drive (SATA, 7200 RPM). These files ranged in size from 250 MB to a few gigabytes. This, of course, isn’t even close to the theoretical maximum of the interface or the drives in the Drobo and this is due to Data Robotics’ proprietary overhead method doing its thing to keep the data intact over redundant drives. While I lamented about not breaking any speed records, I found that the throughput was more than enough to sustain smooth playback of multiple instances of high-definition video (1080p) locally. I was also able to have multiple remote workstations on my LAN crunch on video projects from the shared Drobo, albeit very clumsily (more on that later).

Initial conclusions

The Drobo is a solid piece of stand-alone technology that manages itself and your data without the need of an IT department or storage gurus, if you can afford the intial price plus a couple of SATA drives. Because its storage capacity grows over time at your pace, the Drobo is hands-down the best solution for small, fast workgroups. You can add drives of any size at any time… that’s it! You can share the Drobo with your networked computers using the optional DroboShare ($199.00 MSRP) or use your computer’s built-in file sharing capabilities. The Drobo’s speed isn’t spectacular considering the incredible interface it provides but should be more than enough for most SMBs and SOHOs.

You want more to consider? My next review will be a hybrid of Drobo usage and iMovie ‘09 editing… over a network! What? How? Yep, it sounds outrageous and crazy but my team has attempted this stunt during our typical workflow. Stay tuned! …And as always, if you have questions or comments about the Drobo, please leave me feedback below or on Twitter.

Enjoy the full set of photos:

iPhoto '09 face recognition in action

If you’ve had the chance to play around with Apple’s new iLife ‘09, you no doubtedly have encountered some pleasant surprises with the updated iPhoto. No, I’m not talking about the useful geo-tagging or the integration with Flickr and social-media heavyweight Facebook… I’m referring to iPhoto’s amazing facial recognition which uncovers subtle things that make ya go hmmmm…

• The people who shoot from the camera most often at family or group events don’t appear much in albums
• iPhoto ‘09 does a darn good job zooming in on individual faces and cropping close for previews, resulting in portraits that are sometimes more flattering than the original photos.
• While training iPhoto to refine facial matches in a large collection, you may realize how closely your features resemble those of your relatives (as much as you may want to deny it)
• You’ll finally understand why some people repeatedly mistake some of your friends for you.
• After confirming a bunch of your own photos you may wonder why you always pose using the same silly grin or smirk
• There are some people you know whose faces are never detected at all by iPhoto… Maybe you should look them carefully in the eye and ask them for proof of human sentience
• Apple’s demos of iPhoto ‘09 must have been running on a zillion gigahertz Mac… That or their demo iPhoto library had no more than 20 pics in it

iPhoto understands faces even from different angles

With those considerations in mind iPhoto ‘09 may sound like a crude beast of an app. Hardly. Apple engineers painstakingly integrated a powerful technology feature from Japanese firm Omron and tossed in more niceties like Google Maps geo tagging. As a basic photo organizer, iPhoto retains its simple system of smart albums and traditional keywording which eases the chore of finding photos in your collection.

Scrolls like butter

Though some features really weigh heavy in legacy hardware (this means those of you still on PowerPC Macs) multitasking works surprisingly well within the app. As long as you set some certain display preferences, namely uncheck Apperance > Border: Outline and Border: Drop Shadow, iPhoto truly “scrolls like butter” as Steve Jobs puts it.

Some facial expressions may trip up iPhoto

iPhoto uses an extraordinary amount of CPU time during facial recognition processes but thankfully you can switch away to other parts of your collection and continue. Upgrading an existing iPhoto library was quick but the initial process of scanning my personal 10,000+ photos for facial features took over two hours (2.16 GHz MacBook Pro, Core Duo, library on a 7200 RPM external drive connected via Firewire 800). Some of the functional elegance comes at the slight cost of general performance if your library holds many pics.

Facebook and Flickr Integration

Social networks are huge and Apple understands this. Facebook alone has over 150 million users worldwide, more than 25 million of them interacting using mobile devices. You can upload individual photos, groups or sets of photos, and entire Events to Facebook. Once this is done with a few simple clicks, tagged faces will be seamlessly integrated with Facebook. In face, if extra faces are tagged from the Facebook network, it can sync those changes back down to your Mac’s collection if you wish. What about those folks who already have a thousand photos on Facebook outside of their Macs? Looks like they’ll be out of luck. The integration only occurs when the initial synced upload begins from iPhoto.

Auto geo-tags

Flickr usage is less flashy but welcome nonetheless. Google Maps data is automatically read from GPS-enabled devices like the iPhone and geo-tagged images can show you where an image was taken. If the area happens to be well-known (something that ironically isn’t well-explained) then it is spelled out in the photo’s Information box. Otherwise you will get something generic like “Anaheim” when I really want it to say “Anaheim Convention Center”. Geotags are used extensively on photo services like Flickr to sort and categorize the vast libraries of online pictures, and are also integrated into event systems like Upcoming.org, a service owned by Yahoo.

Useful shortcuts

While wading through photos making sure people’s faces were tagged, I discovered some keyboard shortcuts worth mentioning for your navigate and tag process. After selecting a photo and clicking Name, you’ll get the single photo view with rectangles around recognized faces. Some may be named, some are “unknown face”, and others may have a name confirmation question. Use these helpful keystrokes to speed up your workflow:

• TAB will cycle the name rectangles between recognized faces
• RETURN on an “unknown face” or an established name will let you edit an identity, letting you either type or select a stored name using a handy drop-down menu
• If you TAB to a rectangle where iPhoto asks “Is this [name]?”, use RETURN to checkbox (accept) it or TAB to select the X (reject) icon then use RETURN to confirm
• Use the left or right arrow keys to switch forward or backward between photos in Name view
• When you’re through editing names for recognized faces, click Done to see the normal photo browser

Huge CPU spikes when processing faces

Scalability

I’m not sure how Apple will tune iPhoto in the long run to scale when collections swell to the tens of thousands or many years worth of photos… it’s apparent that you and I are expected to maintain and back up a giant, monolithic library on a single volume and pray your hard drive doesn’t fail. My advice is to back up your photo collections in two-year, overlapping increments or in chunks of 4 GB, whichever is collected first. This may save you headaches if a drive fails or Time Machine is inadequate, but will split your library. Serious photo collectors will want to invest in a giant storage solution like a Drobo with DroboShare to house a family library. Recent versions of iPhoto will let you choose a library from an arbitrary volume, even one shared over a network. There is no offline data support, however, so if need access to split repositories, you may need to look for something more powerful (and likely much more expensive). It would be nice for Apple to include a feature to import old, burnt-onto-disc iPhoto libraries which can be then re-exported to disc with updated info like geo-tags and face data.

Great fun overall

Even with its occasional quirkiness, Apple has greatly improved iPhoto with the addition of facial recognition. The subtle refinements show in things like the slideshows, where subjects’ faces are automatically centered in the video frame. Note: If selected faces in a vertical photo are spread out, slideshow will not show the entire photo and you may not see faces at all. Confused? Trust me, you’ll spot the quirk sometime, unless Apple catches this first. Speaking of slideshows, iPhoto ‘09 includes some exciting new styles with equally impressive soundtracks, some of which obviously draw from Jobs’ ties with Pixar. The printed books feature has also been reworked and will allow embedded Google Maps which is nice for family trip albums. Apple definitely has a winner on its hands with iPhoto ‘09 and makes for a no-brainer purchase as part of the wildly successful iLife suite.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This video covers the steps needed to work on an early-2008 MacBook Pro (Penryn), NOT the aluminum unibody models that came out in October 2008.

Excerpt:
Google Maps has become the standard mapping utility for everything from getting directions and finding nearby food options to viewing the surface of the moon. Are you getting the most out of your Google Maps experience? Keep reading to get some helpful hints on how to maximize (or minimize) all your mapping desires. 

See entire article at Mashable…

“…Now the new Armory goes a bit beyond that; not only can you check out a persons gear, you can check to see if they have cleared that heroic before, or any heroic, or if they have ever earned an emblem of heroism. You can even see if what raids they’ve done, how much gold they’ve earned, and how much their biggest heal has been for. It’s all amazing really…”

Crazy news! It’s going to be plain as day to my guild that I’m terrible at raising cash and that I apparently don’t farm enough raid resources as I should be! Is this level of transparency a cause for concern? Maybe it depends if you’re a casual player trying to get buy or a gold farmer whose keeping it on the down low… Hey! How’d you earn only 15 gold yesterday and today it says you earned 1,000 gold? Aha!

Update: Anyone notice that the Armory no longer shows your profile with the buffs you had when you last logged off? Ugh, I sure don’t feel very adequate without the Aspect of the Hawk buff on me!

My take: Don’t know how much weight this system will have on actual results but it could potentially change the entire way SEO and placement strategies work.

Marketing and SEO agencies, take note. If this becomes a defacto standard you will need to refocus some of your resources toward manual placement promotion.

Unfortunately for a lot of businesses and small sites this may create a work pill because they will need to constantly push promote their search engine results to keep them from disappearing from listing. It’s definitely an interesting use of the Digg method but I think Google is making search technology non-pragmatic at the cost of accuracy.

read more | digg story