External Storage - How far we have come!

It's no surprise that as a geeky type growing up in the information technology age I've been exposed to a lot of different types of storage and external media. I've just spent the day trying to get a potentially flaky 3TB hard drive to come online in my NAS box and while it's been driving me crazy, and stretching my knowledge it has led me to think back over all storage issues I've gone through over the years. Back as a kid in the early 80's and the dawn of the personal computer the first storage media I experienced was the humble audio cassette. Our first household computer was a Sinclair ZX81 which used a standard cassette recorder to play back a binary signal from its 3.5mm earphone jack into the "data in" on the computer.

The tape drive was a staple for home computers throughout the early and mid 80's with it being the most common accessory for computers such as the Commodore Vic20, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, TRS-80 and Dragon 32 & 64. I seem to remember that at the time Radio Shack (Tandy in the UK) was doing a brisk trade in these external tape drives, in fact they may have sold more of these than their own branded PC's. The tape was so important that the Amstrad 464 computer came along and built the tape player directly into the keyboard chassis (see below).

Of course the amount of data that these early machines needed to transfer wasn't high. The ZX81 had a standard onboard memory of 1Kb, the Spectrum 48Kb, the Commodore 64... well 64Kb. But the baud rates and reliability for loading a program were horrendous (250 baud) with it taking up to 15 minutes to load a game (stop whining you Battlefield 4 players). There wasn't really any way of knowing that everything was okay all you had most of the time were coloured bars to indicate anything.

If everything went well then your program might load, otherwise you often heard the tape reaching the end of the side and the tape drive would click off. You were then left to flip the tape over and try again with different volume settings or otherwise you may have lost interest in playing at all.

I think that Commodore saw that there was a real need to bring the then very expensive 5 1/4" floppy disk drive technology into the home, and leveraging their market to the commercial space they launched the 1540 and 1541 disks in around 1982-1983. This gave home users access to 170Kb of storage for about $400 (I think it was 300 pounds in the UK). Sinclair went a different direction by launching their proprietary MicroDrive. This consisted of a sealed 15ft (5m) loop of magnetic tape which could store 85Kb of information. I actually owned one of these with my Spectrum and it allowed me the ability to load and save my own basic programs easily. However they were not widely adopted by software and games manufacturers. On the other hand my brother, who owned the Commodore 64 and 1541, found ample games available on floppy disk.

The 5.25" floppy won the battle and became the main storage medium for several years, running in parallel with the 3.5" floppy which was more versatile in size and durability. During this time I went to college and then University and lost my focus on computers. I missed most of the Commodore Amiga age (although loved the graphics) and I missed the 286 and 386 IBM compatibles. Finally I was earning enough to purchase a 486 based PC in 1993 or 1994 so I picked up a DX2-50Mhz machine which I seem to remember had both a 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drive. It also had the first hard drive I had come into contact with, which I think was 20Mb in size. These hard drives often took up at least one 5.25 bay, sometimes two and weighed a significant amount. But the technology boom race was on as we headed towards 2000, and drives capacity grew and physical sizes shrank. Every month there was a computer fair held locally and I would go and hunt for bargains. I remember picking up a 210Mb EIDE 3.5" drive at one of these events along with a new EIDE controller made by Pine (I think Pine Technologies is now XFX, the video card manufacturer). At the time you took a risk with these purchases, but they were cheaper than buying from retail stores by a large margin.

Motherboards had little or no expansion built on to them and everything was an add-in card. ISA cards like the one above provided connections for serial (mouse), parallel (printer), 40 or 80 pin hard drive and possibly CD connections, and floppy connections. Some even integrated audio. You would have to juggle the jumpers on the card along with some nice additional to the MS-DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the drives to work.

At this point I was using my machine for some graphic design work and needed places to store addition files. I picked up a SyQuest 5.25 internal drive, which had a useful capacity of 22Mb storage in a rigid cartridge. It was an internal 5.25" drive which ran on a SCSI bus, and was a pain to install and get working.

But while this was a great product it was quickly overtaken by other external and removable media. Firstly people were finally starting to burn data to CD's but also an amazing product hit the streets in the form of the Iomega Zip drive. This oddly coloured (blue/purple) unit stood out from the pack in that it provided 100Mb of storage in a roughly 3.5" rigid disk. The cheapest version connected via the parallel port and had a pass through for your printer. If you were more adventurous there was also a SCSI version as well as a USB version later. An internal drive (in beige) was also available for parallel ATA (IDE/EIDE).

I have a sneaky suspicion that if I looked hard enough I might be able to find a Zip disk somewhere in the house, I remember using them as storage for design work and as our first real backup media. I think the Zip had a huge affect, but it was now getting towards the turn of the century and USB was taking off in a big way (like the tech stocks). USB 1.1 made way for 2.0 and people finally had an almost hot-swappable external media option. I personally remember being happy with Windows Millennium Edition because it cleared up a number of problems I had with USB functions, do you remember the "safely remove this drive" icon? Then the Zip drive went to 250Mb, the Iomega Jazz drive hit 1Gb and then USB drives took off. External 3.5" and later 2.5" hard drives have became the norm, with USB thumb drives being the easy mobile choice for files. Right now you can easily purchase a 4TB external 3.5" drive for under $200 and a 128GB thumb drive for under $50.

Now USB 3.0 provides 5 Gbit/s transfer speeds with 3.1 offering 10 Gbit/s which should allow you a huge pipeline to transfer data. But things are changing, finally the promise of "cloud" storage is being realized with Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and applications like Dropbox (which allow storage and syncing of files over the internet). While these options may not completely replace the ability to backup large libraries of data (such as your digitized home movies) they do allow storage for important files, spreadsheets, presentations and photos with almost universal access from PC's, tablets and mobile phones. As long as they can keep files secure this is obviously where storage trends are heading. While I couldn't find recent numbers it is probably safe to say that companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft each have at least an exabyte (over a billion gigabytes) or more of storage capacity. In comparison to our old 1.44Mb floppies that about 700,000,000,000 of them... or a stack that would reach to the moon and then back... a couple of times!.

PC LOAD LETTER!

I don't think there's anyone with a inkjet or multi-function laserjet who has not felt the same way that the guys do in the 1999 movie "Office Space" about their printer. If you haven't seen that movie then I highly recommend it, there's a link to the printer scenes on youtube.com here.

Who of us has not been totally frustrated by paper jams, dried up ink, weird error messages or lost connectivity when it comes to printers? I've had a little more experience with printers than most as I used to repair them as part of my job. There's many a time I've had my hands inside the paper feed assembly of a LaserJet 8100 or cut my fingers trying to replace the swing plate assembly in a LJ 4250. But those were business printers with high print volumes, so you expect to have to expend time to maintain them. When it comes to printing at home you really aren't looking to print a lot, or at least that's how it is for our house. What I do hope for is reliability when I do need to print or scan, and good quality prints. We have a couple of printers at home, one is a quirky Deskjet 6940 which produces good prints on higher quality presentation paper, however on regular paper they are dark and murky. My wife has been able to print some images to use for decoupage art projects, but the results are mixed versus the original scan or image. Now this is not an expensive printer (they get you on the ink) but there are a couple of issues. Firstly occasionally it goes berserk. It loses connectivity and all the lights on the control panel blink very fast. It's not an error code... it's just lost it's mind. Then other times the ink cartridges just don't seem to work right. Colours seem wrong, there are streaks and fading. Now I understand if the printer stands for a long time you will have issues but this kind of thing happens even when the printer has been used recently and on new cartridges. Usually, if I spend 20 minutes with isopropyl alcohol and Q-tip, I can get the printer happy.

Our second printer is an Officejet 6300 multifunction inkjet which I was given (similar to the one above). It has some great features like an ADF, ability to scan from a web interface, scan to a folder (if you can get the software right) and faxes it too (although I've never used that feature). Print quality is acceptable, however the 6940 seems a lot better in my opinion even thought they are roughly using the same inks and print technology (the 6940 can take a photo black cartridge). Now what I can't stand about this unit is just how flaky it is. Here is a list of issues:

1) Regularly loses all network settings even though it's on a UPS battery backup unit.
2) It fails to pick up paper.
3) Often it fails to boot, locking up during the initialization phase.
4) It will report paper jams when there aren't any.
5) It will repeatedly report a cartridge error during the boot process, requiring several power cycles before it gets itself together.

The other night was the last straw when I power failed the unit 6 times to be able to scan a single sheet of paper. Of course because the printer showed the cartridge error the scanner function was also disabled. I'd had enough it's finally time for a replacement. As fate would have it I had been asked at work to look up some entry level printers for a work colleague. He was going to go with a B&W (maybe a Brother) but I found myself overlapping into entry level colour printers too. I usually find myself pulling in a bunch of information from the manufacturers site, and then go looking for real world reviews on Amazon.com or maybe Staples.com. I've found that over the last couple of years the amount of feedback available for hardware has become an invaluable tool to what choices I make. While a single 5 star rating might not be that objective, when 165 people give an average of 4.5 out of 5 then I'm thinking that's looking promising. I always read a selection of the negative reviews just to see if anything stands out as a major flaw.

My experience with HP printers over the last 10 years has been mixed. They have produced some great printers and some total dogs, even in the business space (P3015). HP seriously cut back production a few years ago and the quality seemed to suffer, now they seem back on track again. During the past few years I've managed to salvage some printers which have been too costly to repair for the customer. In fact I have a colour LaserJet 3500 at my office desk which is pieced together from a couple of broken machines. All it needs is some careful handling, as the door mechanism is extremely complex and it appears people were always breaking clips or damaging the transfer assembly. To avoid unhappy customers I usually recommend that they purchase an HP Exchange CarePack (extended replacement warranty) with their new printer so that they can guarantee a replacement onsite next day if their unit fails. It's definitely worked out well for a several of our customers, with units failing at the 18 to 24 month period after the original one year warranty had expired. So with the mixed history what I was looking for was a printer which got generous thumbs up from it's owners (because they are the harshest critics) and it appeared the LaserJet M251nw was the winner.

I'm surprised that HP has this printer listed at $329 when the street price is closer to $180. With some additional coupons I managed to get the unit for under $160, although I know HP will get the money back in toner. I'd like this unit to last some time as printer technology doesn't appear to have got that much better in the past few years. It still seems to sit around 600x600 dots per inch (dpi) with additional clever "ImageREt" technologies adding additional qualities to the print output. So I'm also going to pick up a 4 year CarePack Exchange warranty for this printer which retails for $110. The idea of having a reliable and warrantied printer up until 2018 sounds nice.

So far I've only managed to print about 10 pages, but the colour output looks crisp and bright. Setup wasn't as easy as I hoped, particularly the HP Web Apps (which I doubt I will use). I've only dipped my toe into the features and I'd like to pick up some good laser paper for testing. So let's end this blog entry here and I'll tell you more about the printer itself in a later review, I need a few days to try it out and make sure I've given it a run for it's money.

Bitcoin Mania

Back in the late 90's there was an article published called "100 things to do on the Internet before you die". I think it was originally in Wired... or some other technology orientated (printed) magazine from the period. It included a lot of activities, from making a webpage to shopping online, many of which I had done and a few things I hadn't. Over the years I've tried to jump on the bandwagon for a lot of new (financially accessible) fads like joining Twitter, posting to YouTube and Instagram. I've tried some social value sites which promise that you will learn to appreciate how socially relevant you are. I think I did that for about 10 days before calling that off. It might have been something to do with an almost instantaneous hacking of my Twitter account as soon as I linked it. So overall I somewhat potter around on the internet and technology in general. I was intrigued when the Bitcoin originally became popular on the interwebs a couple of years ago. I have been dabbling in distributed computing programs since 1998 (it was on the 100 list) and I thought that if I was writing an article today about things you need to do online before you die then mining for Bitcoins should be on it. Bitcoins are sadly misunderstood in that people don't seem to connect the mining aspect with real work, and thus the creation of worth. I tend to think of it in the same way that someone might outsource video rendering or model simulations, my computer power is being used as a resource. It's not an ideal comparison, but there are plenty of references online if you want to try to understand how currency works. I wasn't one of the first wave of miners... I came later (at the end of 2011) and I spent a little time dedicating an unused PC and video card to run the mining client. Back in those days the virtual "currency" had jumped from $15 to $30 and then back down to about $2. I wasn't seeing the mining as a money earning proposition, not at $2 a Bitcoin. However I would never have realized it was going to become worth $1000 a Bitcoin in November 2013.

Unfortunately I sold the 10 coins I mined, at a point where I thought it would pay the electric bill and recoup the cost of my video card. It's quite amazing when you dig into the trading which surrounds Bitcoin as it is global and non-stop. People have made huge money out of trading bitcoin, probably more than the miners unraveling the code to release new coins. If you are interested in seeing the live transactions then this is an interesting watch. They provide a virtual map of transaction on an animated map, a still from which is shown below.

Bitcoin currently has a mixed reputation. While Virgin Galactic says it will allow budding space tourists to purchase tickets with Bitcoin on the one hand, the FBI has shut the door on the "Silk Road" a notorious dark web store for drugs and other illegal activities. While new doors open in some countries,China has just moved to curb Bitcoin usage within in it's borders causing Bitcoin to temporarily lose about half it's value.

On thing I have noticed is that Bitcoin is almost always in the news now, if anything that gives it additional credibility. I wonder how many people have speculated by taking steps to acquire coins and are now storing them like virtual gold or silver. The media loves the stories of people getting rich or finding 100's of bitcoins on old hard drives. What will happen when the FBI dumps the 174,000 coins (or is it 144,000) it seized back in October. In November that would have been worth a staggering $174 million, now it's "only" worth about $100 million. Then you have to wonder about the new kids on the block too, such as LiteCoin. Currently the news is that there is a scarcity of AMD Radeon video cards because they are being bought up to use to mine these easier coins.

I think the next couple of years will make or break Bitcoin (and probably LiteCoin too). We'll work out if a crypto currency has legs or if it's a giant bubble waiting to burst. I've re-started a mining machine, but it's slow going now that the Bitcoins are harder to mine (by design). Currently I spend more in keeping that machine running than I can make from the percentage of a Bitcoin I earn. But it's fun to say you are involved, in the same way I have run machines for years contributing to the World Community Grid project. Should, some day in the future, a cure for cancer stem back to these kind of projects, then I will be able to say that one of my "100 things to do on the web" contributed something.