I figured I’d start a little series here on the blog entitled “Why I love my …”

Since I had already written a post regarding why I love my Zune, I figured it was time for me to extoll the virtues of one of the other gadgets that I love, namely my Amazon Kindle.

When I first heard about the Kindle, I was definately intrigued.  I’ve always been interested in the idea of e-book readers, since I read an enormous amount of books.  I can easily go through 15-20 novels a month when I can find the time to go out and buy them.  My appetite for science fiction and fantasy has lead to a, shall we say, large collection of physical books (at last count, somewhere in the 1500-2000 range).

While I’ve always loved the feel of a book in my hand, I wasn’t wedded to the concept.  It’s the content, not the form factor, that I enjoy.  So anything that can reduce the amount of physical books I have to store as well as the amount of natural resources used up to print those books was a good thing in my book (pun intended).

So, the reduction of paper books was my number one reason for buying the Kindle.  There are a few more, however, that I feel are pretty close to the same level of importance.

I love the convenience of being able to purchase a book whenever I want.  The Kindle includes high speed wireless access to the Amazon store.  Amazon calls this Amazon Whispernet.  It’s essentially 3G EVDO access running on the Sprint network.  There’s no monthly fees for access to this network, however, so it’s a great deal.  You simply access the storefront from your Kindle or from another internet connected device, make your purchase, and the new content is downloaded to your Kindle wirelessly in a matter of seconds.

To go along with that, you can subscribe to newspapers, magazines, even blogs on your Kindle.  New content from these subscriptions are downloaded automatically to your Kindle when the content is made available.  These subscriptions are usually less than their physical media counterparts, as well.

As far as cost goes, even though the Kindle is not cheap as an up front investment, if you read as much as I do, you’ll easily make back the money you spent on it through the savings on the content.  Most books are priced significantly lower than their physical counterparts.

The last thing I’ll say is that I love the fact that with my Kindle with me, I have access to all the books I’ve ordered through it.  As I build up my library, I’ll be able to take all my books with me wherever I go.  It’s really nice to be able to keep all that information in one place.

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.

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!

After getting the runaround with both UPS and Amazon.com, apparently my Drobo and hard drives aren’t coming today.  One package Amazon says UPS picked up, UPS says they don’t have a record of it (fun, fun).  The other package, the trailer was late coming into the local distribution center so it probably won’t make it until tomorrow.

So, looks like it will be another day or two before I get the Drobo and can start playing with it.  Good thing I still have some hard drive space left to record my TV shows!