OOMA – Several years ago I was one of the first to sign up for VOIP. We have family all accross the country and the old land line POTS long distance bills were a real downer. I switched the house phone to Vonage and never looked back. At first there were a few issues, in the early days the call quality was erratic, and you had to use the area code to dial local numbers. Fortunately these were fixed quickly and for many years I was very happy with the Vonage service. In fact I have no complaint with Vonage, other than I had to pay for it.
Enter OOMA. We all have cell phones now on the Sprint family everything 1500 data plan, but old habits die hard and giving up the old home number even though I was paying about $25 per month, dropping the land line just wasn’t going to pass the family vote. I had done a lot of reading about OOMA and found that most of the reviews pretty much had to be interrpreted by evaluating the knowledge level of the reviewer. Newbies had problems, experienced users liked it.
Newegg had it on sale one day for $185 and the usual no tax no shipping, so I took the plunge. Cut the shipping box open plug it into an outlet, connect to the network switch, activate online, make calls, no more phone bill! Pretty simple. Quality is just as good as Vonage or any POTS line and in 10 months I’ll break even. after that it’s all savings. There are monthly taxes and fees that come to about $3.50/month but I’m still up $21.50.
Now when I see the Vonage comercials with everyone throwing their Verion bill on the pile, I just smile because, now, I’m throwing my Vonage bill on the heap.

As I sit here getting ready to RMA my 3rd hard drive this year!!! – I began to wonder if I’m just snake bit, or if there isn’t something else going on. We purchased an HP ex485 Media Smart Server a little over a year ago. It came with a Seagate 750GB 7200rpm drive. That drive just gave up and died without warning at about 3 months old. Fortunately we also had a second drive in the Server and had folder replication turned on, which saved a copy of our data. Still, the operating system had to be reinstalled after the drive was replaced.

Knowing I needed to reinstall Windows Home Server OS, I purchased a new WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA drive. Dual processors, 64Mb cache, 7200rpm, and a $300 price tag! We just replaced that last week. Once we got the new WD drive, we decided to use it as the primary drive in a new WHS custom build. It would run alongside two Seagate drives, both 1.5TB, one 7200rpm, the other a 5900rpm LP drive. It took a lot of configuration testing to get the WD drive to run at the proper speed. The drive has the ability to use the Clock Spectrum feature on the motherboard and until we enabled it in the BIOS, the drive ran at about 10% of its rated speed.

Ok – we get the primary drive up and running, transfer files from the 7200rpm Seagate Drive, roll it into the storage pool for WHS, and now it’s time to copy the files from the 5900rpm Seagate to the WHS file shares and we’ll be up and running as we should be. Click,…Click,…Click, hmmm, Houston, we have a problem. Yes indeed, drive number 3 is about to go belly up! Fortunately, we get all the files copied. Now it’s time to test with diagnostics, attempt repartition and reformat, and inevitably, just RMA the thing in hopes of getting a replacement that will last more than a year.

If you think our experience is unique, just go to Newegg and pull up the reviews on hard drives 1TB and larger and read the reviews. Users are reporting between 10% to almost 40% failure rates depending on the model. The 5900rpm Seagate LP drive shows a 37% DOA or quick failure in the reviews.

The only manufacturer I see getting consistently good reviews is Samsung. Their Spinpoint drives have been getting good reviews for years. I’ll be trying one of their 2TB Drives next. Buyer beware, quality control just isn’t what it used to be.

Looking back on 27 years of experience at the keyboard, I thought it might be time to reflect a bit on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be going.

Back in the day – circa 1983 the personal computer was little more than a replacement for the typewriter, calculator, and the file cabinet. You were a power user if you had 640k of ram and 2 320k floppy drives. Word processing and spreadsheets were the hot applications, and if you were a real geek, you knew what to do with a database. The focus was always on what you were able to
accomplish with an individual PC. The only way to make any money with a PC was to write or customize specific applications targeted at individual tasks. If you could automate a repetitive task that took place in a business environment, you could make a few bucks which of course always just went to buying new hardware or software. As things moved along, the focus was always on more speed from the hardware and what was the next killer app. The more things change the more they stay the same. We all got our 300 baud modems so that we could connect to local bulletin boards and download/upload files for sharing with other users. Then came Compuserve and the WWW which changed everything. 

So even now, most users that I help with their computing problems, bring me their boxes to clean up and fix the broken software or clean out the spyware. Most users are still focused on the single box that everyone in the home uses. That will change dramatically in the next few years. Everyone will be asking their geek/guru friends to help them with their home networks. It’s starting now, but it will explode over the next few years as everyone starts to realize the potential of the home network as the way to unify all communication and entertainment.

Most power users have demystified the complexities of Win XP, Vista, and Win 7. Most of us have no qualms about tearing open any box and upgrading or adding new hardware. The next hurdle for the power user is the network and the Server. I’ve spent the last year playing with Windows Home Server and MS Server 2008 R2. It’s a reasonably steep learning curve for the most users, but not insumountable. The reality to note however is that this isn’t for the average consumer that has spyware loaded on their home PC. Anyone who has proficiency with network setup/admin, and server setup will be ahead of the curve.

What’s going to bring it all into focus and create demand? Entertainment. Large flat screens are now common in the family room. Once people begin to realize that it’s possible to use a home network to record and pipe everything to any screen in the home, demand will follow.

I am currently setting up our home network to record/rip all media to the Home Server so that it’s available everywhere. I am also waiting for the new Ceton card which will let you setup an HTPC to record or view up to 4 channels from your cable connection. Once the content is saved it will be available on any PC connected to your network. Way cool. Once we get that setup, the next hurdle will be to access and stream the stored content over the net when your away from home. I’m hoping that with a 35/35Mbs Fios connection that I can actually get it to work quite well.

In my next post I’ll review my experience with Windows Home Server and outline some of the pitfalls we encountered.