2144 - Drop Down Low

Heavy rain had been predicted, heavy rain fell.

Basically it rained all day. I didn’t even bother to go out. The two images were taken at and from our terrace.

Btw, I have bought a new device, a Network Attached Storage system (NAS) with four hard drive bays. I have installed 4 drives with 2 TB each, configured in RAID 5, thus it gives me about 5.5 TB effectively. That’s more than I need for a long time.

At the moment I am not sure how I’m gonna use the device. The first plan was to make a backup of my two image drives, slightly more than 2 TB. And here I encountered a problem.

It was slow. Damn slow. 10 MB/s slow. Pretty exactly 10 MB/s.

I knew that the NAS was not fast, but the 10 MB/s strongly pointed at my network. And really: the LAN switch in my ADSL modem / router is only 100 Mbit/s, which gives you a net speed of pretty exactly 10 MB/s, protocol overhead included. Ouch!

I didn’t want to replace the provider-supplied modem and bother with Internet connection settings, thus I just deactivated WiFi, placed a Netgear WiFi Gigabit router behind, and now data rates are at 30-40 MB/s.

Still not fast, but excatly what I paid for. This will cut the time for a full backup from 47 hours down to about 15 hours. Pretty OK, given that all other backups will be incremental.

So far I can recommend both devices highly.

The Song of the Day is “Drop Down Low” from the 2003 De-Phazz album “Plastic Love Memory”. Hear it on YouTube.