I decided to buy a NAS and remove the disks from my home server.
I didn’t want to spend too much money, since this was one of those non-essential projects. But equally, I didn’t want to spend too little and get something that would break and destroy all my data with it. Eventually I decided upon a Promise SmartStor NS4300N.
Features
It had all the features I wanted, including:
SMB/CIFS for Windows clients
NFS for Linux clients
RAID5
Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo Frames
First impressions
So how did it shape up?
The build quality was relatively poor. It’s made from thin plastic and feels flimsy. The disk caddies are incredibly flimsy and flexible, and I felt nervous even handling them; but this didn’t matter because I planned to assemble it and leave it alone.
It wasn’t exactly quiet either. There is an 80mm fan for the disks and a 40mm fan for the internal PSU. The 80mm fan only spins when the disks are hot but it is very noisy when it does so. The 40mm fan is constant but not so loud. And of course there’s the sound of four hard disks, which varies depending on make and model. Overall, it’s probably quieter than a standard computer, but you wouldn’t want to sleep with it in your bedroom.
It’s not a problem for me because I’m putting it in the loft.
Setting it up
The initial setup wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it could (should?) have been, especially for beginners. But it wasn’t really much trouble to set up a RAID5 array with 4 x 500GB disks and format it, for a total of 1.4TB.
More confusing, perhaps, was the selection of different protocols and the layout for setting up users, shares and permissions.
I wanted to set up two shares, public and private and set public to be world-readable (for my media centre) and private to be accessible only by me. If you create these accounts on the NAS, it’s simple enough to tick the boxes and set the desired permissions on Windows (SMB/CIFS) shares.
But NFS was a different kettle of fish. No user-level permissions are available on the NAS for NFS, and the only control you get is a list of allowed IP addresses. By default the NAS says it allows *.*.*.* but I found that this didn’t let anyone in. Adding real IP addresses to the list worked.
However, I found that when you have data shared both as NFS and SMB/CIFS, the permissions go out of the window and are not respected at all. An unauthenticated guest user was able to read and delete files from my private share.
Performance
Performance was far worse than I had expected.
With the NAS mounted on my PC via NFS, it would only manage 4.8MB/s sustained write rate, and 13.5MB/s sustained read rate. That’s significantly worse than the sustained 30MB/s I used to get with the same disks in the server, as a Linux software RAID array. On top of that, writing at this speed tied up my computer’s quad-core CPU 100% with IOWait.
With the NAS mounted on the same PC via SMB, it was able to write sustained at 9.2MB/s.
This is really quite poor, given that the same set of disks when connected directly into the server with SATA could write at some 35MB/s.
It depends on your usage though – if you simply want to play music and videos from the NAS then 10MB/s is fine, even for high definition. However I use mine for large backups and I don’t want to wait almost ten times longer for the backups to complete.
Summary
If you already have a NAS or storage server that you are happy with, don’t buy this.
If you want to use NFS, don’t buy this.
If you care about high performance, don’t buy this.
If you want a reasonably-priced solution for backups or sharing media between computers, buy this. I reckon it would be fine to shove in a cupboard and simply drag your movies onto from your computer, so you could watch them on your media centre.
However, it didn’t cut the mustard with me, so I sent it back. I’ve now returned to my original system with the four disks hosted in the server. It’s fast and the permissions work fine – the downside is that I have to keep a large, noisy ATX tower case and can’t switch to an Intel Atom solution
Today my new 35mm scanner arrived – a Plustek OpticFilm 7200.
The 7200 is the bottom of the OpticFilm range, but perfect for my needs. All of the scanners in the range have the same optical resolution, but some offer features such as iSRD infrared dust and scratch removal, or MultiExposure where the scanner makes 4 images and combines them to reduce noise.
As I’m scanning brand new negatives, I don’t plan to scratch them or let them get dusty. The MultiExposure might have been nice, but it nearly doubled the price of the basic 7200 model, which set me back just £115 from Amazon.
First impressions
Opening, the box I was impressed straight away. Obviously the basic were there: the scanner, power and USB cables but there was also a padded carry case.
The build quality of the scanner definitely puts it in the realm of home users but it’s perfectly fine.
There are two plastic trays: one that can take four slides and one that can take a strip of up to six negatives. I was a little disappointed by the negative tray, as it didn’t have the “dots” to help the film keep aligned and it can be tricky to get the film into it, especially if it’s new film that still has a tendency to curl.
When sliding the trays into the scanner, you can feel it “bump” into notches so it sits in the right place. These notches aren’t as precise as I would like and you can’t always tell if you are exactly in the right place until you’ve done a preview scan.
The software
According to this page, the OpticFilm 7200 is not supported by any SANE backend, and therefore cannot be used with Linux. Shame.
Installation on Windows was easy enough, although the supplied SilverFast software has a distinct “Windows 3.1″ look and feel about it. It works well enough though and after a few minutes of playing I worked out most of the important features.
Image quality
So far I’ve scanned two rolls of film and I’ve been impressed with the results. I’ve been scanning at 3600dpi which gives a resolution of round about 17-18 megapixels. Saved as a TIFF, this takes up about 55MB.
The built-in sharpening feature does a good job – I can’t tell that my scans have been sharpened which is a relief. Some sharpening software overdoes it and you end up with unsightly artefacts.
The colours are good so long as you’ve done all of these:
Chosen the right film manufacturer
Chosen the right film type
Chosen the right ISO film speed
Done a prescan to allow SilverFast to calibrate itself
In extremely over- or under-exposed photos, the software can do some funny things with the exposure. But I guess the moral of that story is to expose your photos properly…
The photos I’ve scanned so far have either been on old, grainy film or not focussed properly so it’s hard to tell how sharp the scans are. Except that some of my old negatives from a disposable camera had scratches, and these showed up lovely and sharp in the scans!
Conclusion
This scanner is fantastic value for the money.
Sharpness, colours and dynamic range are all very good.
Serious users should consider getting one of the higher scanners with iSRD and MultiExposure which will help with image quality even more. And they still don’t cost ridiculous amounts.
Sample
I took this picture recently with a Canon AE-1 Program 35mm SLR, using a 50mm prime lens and ISO400 Fuji Superia film.
Unfortunately the lab who processed the film also scratched it, which is pretty annoying. But it demonstrates how sharp the scanner is, and highlights the reason for buying a scanner with iSRD.
As I was on a camping holiday in a remote part of Pembrokeshire last week, I decided to take my Eee and the USB modem, just to see how it would work. I was aware that there would be no HSDPA coverage, since I had checked the coverage map before I left.
UK cellular network coverage
2G
3G
HSDPA
Three give the following summary of the different connection types:
2G network: gives you voice, text and picture messaging services
3G network: gives you all of the above, plus video calling and the internet on your mobile
HSDPA network (Mobile Broadband): gives you all 2G and 3G services, plus high-speed internet access on your mobile and with your dongle (USB modem)
When I connected to the network in rural Pembrokeshire, I was not surprised to find that I only got a 2G connection. The dongle’s LED was green, and according to Huawei:
Green - a GPRS data service is established
Dark Blue - a UMTS data service is established
Light Blue - a HSDPA data service is established
But what surprised me most was the latency in the connection. Pinging www.google.com gave responses between 4 seconds and 35 seconds! This of course makes web browsing totally unusable.
So my advice to anyone who is thinking of getting a USB 3G modem is to make sure your target areas are covered, and don’t expect it to work outside cities.
Note: This article is under development. More info and screenshots will be added later. Keep checking back!
I decided to buy a mobile broadband USB modem yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, I work as a wireless network & VPN specialist for the University of Bristol. At the time of writing, there are 507 access points around campus, giving pretty good coverage. However I often have to visit locations with dead wireless to fix it – and it’s times like these that mobile broadband would come in really handy.
After a bit of market research, I found that Three was the cheapest network; however their standard issue USB modem is made by ZTE and some Googling shows that this isn’t well supported by Linux. That’s a showstopper for me. However, O2 offer Huawei modems which, according to the Internet, work out of the box with recent versions of NetworkManager, which is included with distros such as Fedora and Ubuntu.
After a quick word with an O2 sales adviser, I was told that Windows and OS X are supported, and Linux is not only unsupported, but “won’t work”. Of course, I took this with a pinch of salt. I prefer to believe articles on FedoraForum, for example.
I run a number of operating systems on my various computers. It’s not essential to have it working on all of them, but it would be nice. Here’s what I’ve got:
Home desktop PC: Dual boot Fedora 11 with Windows Vista for occasional gaming or audio work
Main laptop: EeePC 901 with Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04
Secondary laptop: HP nx7400 dual boot Fedora 11 with Windows XP for occasional stuff (such as using my slide scanner)
Work PC: Fedora 10
Work laptop: Macbook with OS X 10.5 Leopard
So how did O2 Mobile Broadband really fare on these various systems?
Ubuntu Netbook Remix
First I tried it with the computer I am likely to use most on the move – my trusty EeePC. I connected the modem and was immediately greeted with a screen saying it had detected a USB modem.
I was asked to pick a network provider from a short list.
Setup was complete!
I now connect by using the NetworkManager list, the same way as for regular wireless networks. However, even if I connect to O2 Mobile Broadband, it still uses wireless networks in preference if possible. Very sensible!
Using NetworkManager to select a 3G connection
Fedora
Fedora runs a very similar version of NetworkManager to Ubuntu. The main difference is that you don’t get a magic wizard to put the settings in for you. But don’t worry, it’s quite simple.
Right click the NetworkManager icon, click Edit Connections
Under the Mobile Broadband tab, click Add
Do the same on your Ubuntu PC, except click Edit.
Copy the settings over (or look them up from O2).
Done!
Windows XP
Getting it to work on Windows was easy, although I was not impressed by the software. When you plug in the USB modem, it automatically mounts as a virtual CD-ROM which then autoruns the installer. It’s all themed in the O2 colours and looks smart, even if horrible and blue. Installing it is a simple case of clicking Next repeatedly.
But what I didn’t like was the way that the software automatically takes control of your wired and wireless connections too, without consent.
The main screen
In its defence, it does work and it does do the job. It even has nice features, such as being able to prioritise various connections or networks. You can say you want the wired to always take precedence, followed by your home wireless network, then the 3G network, and finally your neighbour’s wireless.
Listing wireless and 3G networks
However, the application is ugly, blue and blobby. It looks like a UFO. It installed yet another tray icon I don’t want, and it’s changed the way I connect to wireless networks. Of course I’m capable of adapting to the change, but I liked the way I connected to networks before. Why force me to change?
One thing I haven’t tested yet is its ability to connect to WPA2-Enterprise (802.1x) networks, which I use daily as part of my job. This is where lots of other third-party wireless applications fall down.
Tonight I will look into ways to remove the app but keep the driver – and perhaps have the 3G connection available to me as an on-demand connection, the same way that Windows handles VPN connections.
Overall, I’m glad I will almost never be using this laptop with my 3G connection.
Mac OS X Leopard
Despite Apple Macs having a reputation for being intuitive and easy to use, installing the USB modem was a nightmare and I still haven’t got it to work.
While Windows and OS X are the two officially supported platforms, the OS X software is just the default Huawei software without any O2 theming at all. O2 haven’t even bothered to bap in the config in advance. Plugging in the USB modem causes a directory to be mounted, containing an installer and a PDF document. The PDF briefly explains how to install the application and fill in the settings. It has a series of screenshots and simple instructions, although still daunting enough compared with the ease by which most Mac applications are installed.
The software itself is ugly and a bit clunky. It doesn’t have anything sensible like a “tray” icon. You have to load the application manually before you want to use the connection. If you frequently use the software, it would be best to make a dock icon, which you also have to do manually.
Worst of all, it doesn’t actually work (for me). I followed the guide exactly and yet when I came to connect, it always fails with a useless error message of “Connection failure!”.
I recently inherited a box of around 4,000 film slides and was asked to scan them in. I decided that my existing film/slide scanner, a VehoVFS-001, was not up to the task so I investigated alternatives, and eventually settled on a Reflecta DigitDia 5000 – which is simply a rebadged (and cheaper!) Braun Multimag 4000.
The consistent advancement of DigitDia 4000 resulted in a substantially reduced scanning speed. More efficient working is now ensured by the faster scanning speed of only 90 seconds at full resolution of 3600 dpi. In addition, the scanner now has an improved and more stable USB 2.0 connection. Scanning is done directly from the slide magazine with a capacity of 100 slides and Digital ICE Technology.
No large-scale and manual inserting of single slides. The easy and fast way for high quality scanning of slides format 24x36mm for archival on CD, projection with digital-projectors, viewing on PC or TV, sending the images by e-mail, printing at home or exposure the images on professional lab on high quality photo-paper. Compatible for CS/Universal/Braun and LKM Magazines.
Digital ICE™ – Hardware-based Dust-and Scratch removal with infrared sensors and automatically Software correction.
DigitalROC™ – Color Restoration; Image Quality will be restored.
DigitalGEM™ – Grain Management; minimize grain to restore the image’s sharpness.
Image Sensor: Linear Array Color CCD
Scanning mode: 48 Bit
Optical Resolution: 3600×3600 dpi
Lamp: Cold Cathode Fluorescent lamp
Scanning preview: 15 seconds
Scanning Speed (ICE off):
ColorScan 1800 dpi 60 seconds
ColorScan 3600 dpi 120 seconds
Max. Scanning Area: 37.5 x 37.5 mm
Dynamic Range: 3.8 Dmax.
Batch Scanning: directly from magazine
PC Interface: USB 2.0
Output connector: 1x USB 2.0
Viewer: Slide Viewer with backlight to examine slide
All sounds promising so far, and the Digital ICE sounds like a definite bonus, as frankly I can’t be bothered to clean 4,000 slides.
I’ve now scanned in over 2,000 of my slides so I feel I can write about the scanner with at least some experience.
Image quality
In general, no problems at all with the image quality. For a 35mm slide, you get an image that’s around 14 megapixels in resolution. Some of the slides I encountered were some other format (sorry, don’t know much about film!) and were square. With these, you get around 10 megapixels.
The colour reproduction isn’t great. The colours are not well saturated and the scans have a distinctly washed-out feel to them. This is no problem if you plan to edit the photos manually later, e.g. using Photoshop or GIMP. The scanner package also includes a feature for colour restoration, DigitalROC, which brings me on to my next point…
DigitalROC is useless. Avoid avoid avoid. In photos that are well exposed and colourful in the first instance, it does an OK job and livens the colours up a little. In photos that are anything more than slightly underexposed, DigitalROC comes crashing in and ruins the photo. It makes parts of the picture look like they are in 16 colours. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until after I’d done a few hundred slides, and I’ve had to go back and redo them without DigitalROC. In the end I resorted to using GIMP to adjust the colours – I found that the “Auto white balance” tool usually fixed the colours.
The original sample photo below was underexposed but by no means beyond repair with a little bit of gentle tweaking. But here’s what the DigitalROC made of it…
DigitalROC goes wrong on an underexposed photo
The other software-based enhancement, DigitalGEM is not a lot better. This is supposed to automatically sharpen the image, but I guess the risk with any automatic tool is that there’s no “one size fits all” solution. On some of my photos, DigitalGEM did such a “good” job of sharpening that it cut people’s faces out with hard edges that made them look like cartoon characters.
This next sample shows how DigitalGEM has oversharpened the glasses on the bridge of my great-grandmother’s nose. Perhaps you can’t see in this scaled-down version, and maybe that’s OK; maybe that means DigitalGEM has got away it. But click for the full-resolution version and see how odd it looks. I’m not really happy about this being done to my photos!
DigitalGEM oversharpens
The only enhancement I found to be any good was Digital ICE – the hardware-based technology for removing (well, working around) scratches and dust using infrared light. I haven’t directly compared the same slide with and without Digital ICE, but in the scans that I have done, there isn’t a lot of obvious dust. Sure, it misses larger items like deep scratches and eyelashes, but it seems good at minimising the effect of dust.
The scanner automatically crops the image. This usually works well, although almost all of my scans were rotated by approximately half a degree. Sometimes the auto cropper crops close enough that you can’t tell, other times you get annoying wonky black borders.
Software user interface
The supplied software is rather crude. It is unlike any scanning software I’ve seen before, in that you don’t actually get to see your photos anywhere in the software. In my case, that didn’t bother me. I simply turned off DigitalROC and DigitalGEM, increased the resolution to 3600dpi from its default of 1800dpi (this took some searching) and from then on I simply commanded it to scan trays in batch.
It does not work on Windows Vista, and for you Linux users out there, I couldn’t get it to work on wine either. Maybe with some fighting you could make it go, but it was quicker for me to dig out my old laptop with Windows XP. An Apple OS X version of the software is included, so I can’t vouch for it and I don’t know if it’s any different.
Auto-loading mechanism
For me, this was the main reason for buying such an expensive scanner, and the main advantage over the Veho. In reality, it has been a bit of a disappointment.
First off, Reflecta provide a 100-slide tray with the scanner. Great, I thought, and immediately loaded 100 slides into it. But it quickly became clear that this tray was not well designed and does not hold the slides straight (only up on edge, not along the bottom). If the slides are not straight, they can’t slide neatly into the scanner – and worse yet, as the slides are only held upright along one edge, as soon as they start to slide into the scanner, away from the support, they immediately fall over. Useless!
Luckily, I had a 50-slide tray that came bundled with the slides I inherited. This holds the slides and supports them all the way as they slide in and out. But I still had difficulty with the reliability of the loading mechanism. The first video shows how it should work, and the second shows what it does when it fails.
The most reliable slides in my experience are the fairly thick plastic-framed ones with rounded corners. The mechanism seems fairly able to capture them properly and slide them into the scanner. The round corners means they don’t snag on the “track” they slide along.
The "Goldilocks" slide - just thick enough
I also had some rather thicker slides, with the film sandwiched between two pieces of glass. These had square corners. They usually load into the scanner fine, but upon trying to unload them they often jam and have to be manually removed. This is an unrecoverable jam and so your batch job stops. Pretty annoying if this is in the first few of the tray!
A thick glass FerraniaColor slide
The vast majority of my slides are “standard” thickness and either plastic with round corners, or card with square corners. These almost never get loaded properly, as the arm that pokes the slides into the scanner misses the slide completely, and you get a blank scan. So if you’re scanning thinner slides, you do really need to sit with the scanner and help it along when it changes over. Pretty annoying, as each scan takes almost two minutes, so a tray of 50 keeps you tied to your desk for an hour and a half!
A thin cardboard slide
I’ve managed with this scanner by saving my few thick, plastic slides for unattended overnight jobs, and scanning the thin ones whenever I have time to supervise the scanner.
Verdict
Very good image quality if you disable DigitalROC and DigitalGEM, and are prepared to play with the white balance and/or saturation yourself
The autoloader is not very good at all unless you have a specific type of slide, and defeats the object of having a batch scanner.
It is rather noisy – not only when changing slides but also when scanning slides. Comparable to an inkjet printer, perhaps.
Software is rather crude, but does its job. You’ll be editing your photos in a third-party application anyway so who cares!
It has still saved me significant labour compared with scanning 4,000 slides in the Veho!
This morning I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) for the first time. My first impression was that it’s very polished and usable by non-geeks.
I’m not an Ubuntu user myself; I use Fedora on all my machines – including my EeePC 901. But my other half, Hana, has an EeePC 701. She’s not a geek, and she just wants something that will work for her. She’s seen XP on a 701 and agreed the 7″ screen isn’t really up to scratch.
Recently we tried gOS on the 701. It’s Ubuntu based and very friendly. It’s well laid out and easy to use. Hana used it for a couple of months and got on well with it. The main problem was that wireless never quite worked properly, and using an Ethernet cable kind of spoils the point of a tiny laptop,
So this morning I swapped gOS for UNR. The installation was painless, and first boot went without hitch. The main snag I ran into on the 701 was that the animated menus made the whole system slow down. This turned out to be a bug which was easily remedied by installing two packages.
It’s early days yet – the system has only been functional for about an hour and Hana hasn’t used it yet. I’ll post again with more comments on UNR when we’ve had a chance to play with it.
