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Latte Select

And again I have troubles with two items in my flying circus.

The brand new Philips Latte Select failed now the second time – after it was delivered the first time by amazon.de I had to return it immediately because the watertank was broken (the water indicator).

They sent me a new one and everything worked fine – until yesterday evening. We made two cups of Latte Macchiato – but then the machine stopped working. Normal coffee worked, but as soon as a ‘milky’ version was selected the start/stop button light was just flashing… not the fast flashing indicating that milk or water is missing – no a slower one which is not described in the manual…

Drobo 2TB

But not enough – I started to move large files to my drobo (about 5 files each about 2GB). While the move was performed my MacBook Pro decided to start a backup via TimeMachine to my drobo. After 2mins the light indicators of the drobo where black. It just stopped working.

I disconnected the drobo from the Airport Extreme, pulled out the power line, waited some minutes and then re-powered the device. Re-connected it to the APE and tried again. Same procedure… this time much faster :-(… after seconds the lights where black and the drobo didn’t respond any more.

Because it was already two o’clock in the morning I decided that I wait until the next day to try it again.

This morning I connected the device directly to the MacBook Pro because it was not possible to restart the drobo again while it was connected to the Airport Extreme – and it worked.

So I think this time the Airport Extreme seems to be the device to blame. I restarted the device and then reconnected the drobo – and now everything worked. Strange behaviour….

The Airport Extreme was not dead during this time – everything else worked fine…

Update:
The Philips Senseo LS has been picked up yesterday (Aug., 3rd 2009) evening to take a little repair session… we’ll see how long this session will take.

Update 2:
As promised by Philips Support the Senseo was sent back within 10 workdays. And works great 🙂

Seams to be a lucky day 🙂
Today I restarted a trial on the backup of my MBP via AirportExtreme and the Drobo – and it works…

back on track again...

DROBO 2.0

After almost two month now I want to give a short overview about the ‘new’ DROBO 2.0 box.

Well – it’s a up and down… with more ups, I think 😉

I found several problems on using / setting up the Drobo and some (one) of them are showstoppers.

First of all – here’s my installation in detail:

DROBO 2.0 USB/Firewire, Airport Extreme, MacBook Pro and Sony Vaio

1 – The standby-issue

I thought that it is possible to connect the Drobo to the Apple Airport Extreme via USB 2.0 as external Disk. The Airport is able to host HDDs connected as Airdisk and share them over the network so that every linked computer would be able to connect.

Well, it IS possible to connect the Drobo to the Airport… BUT

The problem is very simple – connecting the Drobo to the Airport will prevent the Drobo from going into standby mode. That results in a really noisy black box. Because the Drobo is situated right under my flat-TV that is absolutely unacceptable. And – of course – there’s also the point that it will consume much more power than being in standby…

Drobo-Share

The question here is now if the DROBO SHARE component would resolve that issue…
Anyone out there having tested it? In combination with the Airport Extreme?

How did I resolve the problem?
Also very simple – I disconnect the Drobo every time I do not use it from the Airport Extreme – within seconds the Drobo switches into standby-mode and is much quieter from this point on. But it is not completly quiet – sometimes the Drobo comes alife by powering up the fan – so if you want it really to be quiet you will have to disconnet the Drobo also from the powerline.

2 – The TimeMachine issue

There’s not really a issue here. Not on the Drobo side, but on the TimeMachine.
TimeMachine always is using the whole HDD capacity you are connecting to the Mac you are using. So if you don’t like to fill up the whole drive with TM backups you will have to create a separate partition to be used for backing up your Mac via TM.

It’s working great and no problems are found so far – I think there will be no issues because both – Apple and Data Robotics – are reffering this functionality. At the Data Robotics you can find a detailed description how to setup an additional partition on the Drobo.

Update, 02-02-2009:
There is a DroboApp called ‘Time Tamer‘ available to limit the appetite of TimeMachine by using a Drobo. I thought that DroboApps only work in combination with DroboShare… but some of them are also working ‘normal’ via AppleScript (Automator in detail)… seems to be worth to check it out…