Well, my Drobo is finally up and running and working really well after having to flash the firmware on all four Seagate drives due to some problems with the version that came on the drives initially.  Apparently, the Seagate ST31500341AS drives with part numbers 9JU138-300 and 9JU138-336 with firmware SD15, SD16, SD17, SD18 or SD19 have problems.  If you have this hard drive you can look on the label to see what the part number and shipping firmware versions are.

To upgrade the firmware, grab the SD1A firmware version from Newegg:

Download Firmware – 8h_SD1A.zip

1 – Unzip the files into a DOS Bootable directory or media. I used a USB key created with the instructions found at http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm.  If you’re going to go that route, make sure your BIOS both supports and is configured to boot off a USB device.  Otherwise you can use a DOS boot disk or CD-ROM.

2 – Attach a Single ST31500341AS 1.5TB unit to a compatible system used previously for Seagate HDD interface firmware loads. My system has a RAID array on it.  I left the RAID plugged in and unplugged my Blu-ray player and plugged the drive in to that cable, which worked with no problems.

3 – Boot the system into DOS and connect to the directory with the firmware files. Then execute the batch file 8HSD1A.BAT. It took less than a minute to flash the firmware.  Since I had four drives to do, I turned off the computer, unplugged the drive and plugged a new one in, started it back up and repeated the process.

Everything seems to be working fine now and I’m really happy with the Drobo.

I’m really excited about the new game my company, Interjuncture Corp., is Executive Producing for the iPhone and iPod Touch.  The game is called iNetMania and it’s produced by Techpad Agency, the designers of the ServerMania board game.  iNetMania is based on ServerMania and the gameplay is roughly the same, but instead of running a webhosting company you’re now running a big commercial website.

There’s more information on the iNetMania website.  iNetMania is scheduled to be available later this month via the App Store.

The Drobo is very, very cool.  The only thing I’ve found so far that’s slightly annoying is that when you format your drives you have to tell Drobo how big to make the partitions, 2TB, 4TB, 8TB or 16TB.  Even if you don’t have that much hard drive space, you can tell it to use 16TB and Windows will see the drive as a 16TB drive, which can be a little confusing.  If you select one of the smaller amounts and then add more space down the road, Drobo will simply create another partition of the size you selected.

The other issue I ran into isn’t with the Drobo, but with the 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas that I bought for it.  Apparently there’s an issue with the firmware on the drives and it needs to be flashed.  While this normally wouldn’t be a problem, when using the drives in the Drobo you essentially have to pull all four drives out, unplug the main system drives and plug the Seagates in one at a time.  Boot from a boot CD, run the flash util, power down and do it again.  Not difficult, just a pain.  That will be my project for this evening, I guess.

I’ve just received word from SnarkyLady that my hard drives arrived this morning and that my Drobo should be arriving this afternoon.  So I’ll have some fun new toys to play with tonight.

Why do I need 6 TB of space?  Well, because Drobo does data protection I won’t actually get to use all 6 TB of that space, but I’ll be using it to store media on.  I have a distributed media system here in the house (which I’ll outline in a later post) so I need lots of storage to store all of our DVDs and recorded TV on.  It’s a pretty cool system that works really well, but it does suck up the hard drive space, that’s for sure!

I’m typically not the type of gamer that picks up a game, plays it for a week or two, then moves on to the next game.  I either play it a few times and put it away because it’s not for me, or I play it for a really long time.

My previous obsession on the Xbox 360 was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (COD4), so it makes sense that when Call of Duty: World at War (COD:WW) came out, I picked it up immediately. My comments in this post are going to be regarding the multiplayer play, as this is what I primarily play.

While I truly love Call of Duty 4, there were a few things that needed some tweaking in the game.  One of the biggest issues was the “assist” point system in multiplayer.  If you hit an enemy and another player on your team finishes him off, you get an assist.  In COD4 you received the same number of points for that assist regardless of if you did the most damage to him or only hit him once.  In COD:WW, they’ve adjusted this mechanism to give assists a sliding scale of points based on damage, a good solution to an annoying issue.

There are various other changes in COD:WW that make it a better game from a multiplayer standpoint.  The maps are more finely detailed in both appearance and layout.  They’ve included the ability to drive tanks on some of the maps, which adds a completely new element to the game that’s pretty interesting.  I’m glad they limited to only certain maps and didn’t completely overwhelm the game with vehicles.

Some of the gripes I had with COD4 still remain in COD:WW.  There are a lot of times during multiplayer play that it seems to go a bit out of sync. I’m not talking about lag.  I’m talking about an opponent killing you while you’re putting a clip of rounds into him and then the replay video showing him shooting you while you’re looking a different direction or just coming around the corner.

Sometimes those issues get really frustrating when you’re having a bad day, but all in all the game is extremely fun to play.  I’m sure I’ll be playing it for quite a while until something new with great multiplayer comes along.  If you have any thoughts on new Xbox 360 multiplayer games coming out I should be on the lookout for, let me know!