Nebby

Wow that's surprising, I guess it's not popular in VA?

Yeah, I thought of doing that but remembered they packed it well last time...back to the retail drives I go for any future purchases!

Full Mfg case holds 20

In this case I ordered 5 and they cut a section of the original packing from the HD manufacturer. Last time around they sent 5 with the full crate and box, which is perfect. This time around they didn't

Latest shipment of drives from newegg was significantly worse in packaging: The side that was basically resting on the box had a couple of popped bubbles, so we'll see how well these drives fare though a break-in session.

Never really looked at MSB stuff before, but it looks like they really like offering lots of upgrades eh?

Going from their product blurb, supposedly it's got a better DAC and an even better analog output stage: http://highresolutiontechnologies.com/music-streamer-ii-plus

Doesn't read like they admitted anything. It sounds almost identical to their original position which was that it's normal and to self-clean with a blower; failing that take it to a service center.

WD Red 2TB drive $105 after coupon EMCXVVW28 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343 Not exactly the same, but it's close...

WD Red 3TB drives $140 after coupon code EMCYTZT2982 (valid only today 2/23): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344

Going from what KG said: You terminate the source with the characteristic impedance of the cable (75 ohm in your example) then terminate the destination end so that the source impedance + resistor = the characteristic impedance (preamp impedance + resistor value = 75 ohm in your example). Of course I might be wrong too...

That's not just a little future proofing, that's h-c level future proofing

Count me in, I'll reserve the hotel room and plane tickets tonight.

Grats on the purchase and it's good to hear that Newegg shipped the hard drives well. A somewhat comparable Windows counterpart would be Barts Stuff Test which I've used before. It looks like they've discontinued the pro version so you're limited to file level , but that should generally be good enough.

That's what I use as well and it's really what I meant by diagnostics. I also personally like to proactively run a burn in test on new drives using badblocks (or any program that'll systematically read/write every block on a drive), I've found that prunes out any drives that inevitably end up with an early death.

I generally upgrade the set of drives around the 5 year period unless diagnostics show that they're starting to fail before that time frame.

That mirrors what I experienced in my testing as well and it's a reasonable tradeoff for the power usage. The scheduled power off and power on times is a nice touch along with the fact that the error alarm is a nice beep and not a klaxon like my raid cards.

^That's a very appropriate pic Happy Birthday Colin!

Happy Birthday!

So I didn't end up purchasing the WD Reds after all, but I did pick up the DS1812+ that I'm hoping will be a good replacement for my pair of aging HP Mediasmarts. I tossed in a couple of old drives to test it out and so far I'm really liking it; the software is amazingly well done especially when you consider it's all inside a browser. I'll do a couple of transfer tests and failure mode testing to see how well it reacts to that later.

Happy Birthday Ed!

In the past they've shipped hard drives similar fashion to this: allowing the HD's to bounce around and cause DOA's. Sometimes you got them well packaged and sometimes you didn't. I hear they've gotten better recently, so I'm going to go ahead an pick up the WD Reds.

Newegg also has a 10% off coupon for WD Red's today: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-236-344&nm_mc=EMCWL-022013&cm_mmc=EMCWL-022013-_-index-_-Item-_-22-236-344 I do worry whether Newegg has improved their hard drive shipping, they've been terrible in the past.

I've been looking pretty seriously at the Synology units myself; they seem to be well built and reliable with very robust software. Additionally from what I've read, their Customer Service is really good (to the point that they'll SSH into the device if you let them, and try to troubleshoot the issue themselves) You can try a live demo of their software here: http://www.synology.com/products/dsm_livedemo.php

Happy Birthday!