I have started this project over at www.StuartHodgkiss.com, and am having one hell of a time building it (I want it to look awesome).

Any ideas welcomed =D

On sunday I bought my first (of many methinks) set,

Well I still think that they are awesome, so much so I used my new ringflash and my 105 Micro Nikor to create the following images…

enjoy

Brando may not have the most impressive looking website but they do stock some impressive looking stuff.

The Ring Flash arrived today and to my surprise is very well built and nicely packaged as well as being very powerful (I was shocked at first and am still seeing rings). I look forward to getting to using this for future pack shots and maybe even portraits so look out for a future review,

in the mean time enjoy the links and the specs

I was interested in this for a while and a shoot looming (and with the knowledge that larger hardware is now coming) I decided to bite the bullet and invest in the app.

I have to say that it was a great purchase and I am a big fan, I’ll try and post a review sometime soon.

=)

For those that know me you were probably aware of the great RAID failure of 2009, For those that don’t the short story was that I was intelligent enough to unmount a 2x 1TB striped RAID from my Mac Pro thus loosing thousands of pounds worth of data in the process (and if anyone had any ideas of how to get that back please get in touch).

Because of this I decided I needed to invest in a safe, reliable, upgradable RAID array to hold my ever expanding iTunes library, but also backup my machines and also store photography content for the company.

Taking advice from friends I looked at several systems, however I always had one particular solution stuck in my head, the one that “Cali Lewis” raved about and the one that won all the awards at various Mac based shows & conventions… The “DROBO” (or Data Robot).

For the uninitiated, a DROBO is a fancy enclosure for HDD which you can upgrade when needs be as well as replace faulty drives, thus giving you a seemingly limitless capacity device which is safe and secure.

The Purchase

The final push for DROBO arrived on the 11th November in the form of an email announcing the new model the fancy DROBO S which seemed far superior to the existing DROBO, offering eSATA to connect it up as well as 5 bays for drives instead of 2. These small had me itching to purchase and not before long I had a shiny DROBO S sat in my shopping basket.

I whipped my credit card out, closed my eyes and pushed the purchase button, knowing that I couldn’t really afford to buy, but it had become necessity in my mind to save future data loss. This is where I discovered that the price I was willing to pay had just jumped up significantly as my £509 device jumped to £610.87 after shipping and tax (Seriously £22.19 for shipping and tax not already included in the quote?). As I had already got this far and was determined to have a DROBO in my life I winced, pressed purchase, and went to bed dreaming of happy storage.

The Delivery

The next day I headed to Micro Direct and decided to buy a few HDD to feed my hungry new baby, after discussing with friends I had decided to buy 3x SeaGate Barracuda 1.5TB drives.

I began to impatiently wait for my DROBO to arrive after 2 weeks my DROBO still hadn’t arrived and on the 9th of Dec I recieved an email to announce that delivery was underway, this prompted me to visit MacUpgrades and purchase a Sonnet eSATA card for my Pro.

Days past

Finally on the 11th December my (£22 swiftly delivered???) DROBO S arrived, I was ecstatic.

Arrival

I am not a man to watch or film unboxing of products, however the unboxing of a DROBO is magic, and after doing so I felt I had missed the opportunity for a video.

That aside the DROBO was almost too easy to set up, turn on add drives install software etc done, I feel comfortable I could of let a simian handle it, within 10 minutes I was moving TBs of data around pretty speedily and without any pain, this thing was great and I radiated a smile for days.

DDAY 12:01:10

After having my DROBO less than a month I came home to my device repeated rebooting itself, odd I thought but did the tried tested IT industry standard, I turned it Off and On…

No such luck… the DROBO was just going through the process of starting up (all lights on) and then turning off (Like the mains had just been pulled), I panicked, and jumped into the DROBO website, after 10-15mins of searching I found reference to something called a “reboot loop” which seemed to describe the issue my device had, I tried the steps, no luck, I googled “Drobo Reboot Loop” and found pages of people with the same issue, How had I not heard of this and, why is it happening to me?

I then bit the bullet and emailed DROBO support.

Impressively, even though it was out of hours I had an email back from a real person within 10 minutes, they went through my issue and explained various ways to reset or kick back into life my little guy, after a few failed attempts the friendly tech guy recommended that I returned it to point of purchase, “I bought it from you” I replied to which the response was to contact the UK sales team, I asked for a number and was told none was available.

This annoyed me, the only reason I bought direct, and payed more than I would of done from a store was for extra support and now I felt like I had none.

After troweling through the site I finally found a phone number for UK Sales and made the call, to which I found an “out of hours” answer phone message.

I went to bed…

UK Support

The next morning I called UK sales and got through to a lovely lady who assured me she would sort everything out and send a new one.

That was the 13th January and today is the 23rd, I have had no further response other than a survey about how my support was.

I will keep you posted, but to be honest I have lost faith in DATA ROBOTICS products and have been unable to access nearly 1.5TB of data for over 10days…

Hi guys, and welcome to the new look website!

So I have never written a blog before so I hope it goes well wish me good luck.

See you soon,

Stu