SpiceWare's Blog

When I plugged in the new DVD SuperDrive the Drobo disconnected again. Looks like there was a short in the Thunderbolt cable that came with the Drobo as wiggling the cable would cause it to disconnect.

I suspect the reason it had disconnected before was my Harmony Touch's recharging based was plugged into one of the mini's USB ports and sometimes when I'd drop in the remote to recharge the cords would wiggle.

Until I could pick up a new cable, I temporarily swapped the orientation of the Thunderbolt cable so that the touchy end was plugged into the Drobo (thus far away from other cables that might move). I also relocated the Harmony's base so that it's now plugged into an extra USB port on the charging stand I use with my PS3 controllers.

I was near an Apple Store today, so I picked up a new Thunderbolt cable. The Drobo no longer disconnects if the cable is moved.

It's too bad thunderbolt is so dang expensive.

 

Although I've subscribed the new iMac to Backblaze, the initial backup of 400+GB of photos and music transferred over from my wife's MacBook is going to take many moons to stay under the 60GB/month cap. So I did some shopping for an external drive to use as a local TimeMachine backup. I looked at the various thunderbolt drives, but they all had multi-hundred dollar pricetags. Even the Seagate adapter for their external drives is $200 - and that doesn't even include the cable! Instead I got a USB3 3TB drive for C$110+tax from Amazon.ca. Not as fast as thunderbolt (especially since it will be running at USB2 speeds), but a heck of a lot cheaper.

I made the mistake of tossing the bad cable out - it came with the Drobo and they probably would have replaced it under their 2 year warranty. I didn't think about that until after the garbage men had already been by.

 

USB probably would have been fast enough as well, the mini and Drobo both support USB 3.0.