Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Troy-Bilt TB32 EC string trimmer



PROS / TROY-BILT TRIMMER lets you add attachments for other landscaping activities, besides simply eliminating weeds.

CONS / This device tends to vibrate quite a bit during operation.

VERDICT / This does not come with a shoulder strap or anti-vibration construction, but this gas trimmer helps you whisk away annoying grass, weeds and other unwanted vegetation.


If you have plenty of lawn care chores to do, the Troy-Bilt TB32 EC Straight Shaft Gas String Trimmer can be a big help clearing away annoying weeds and grass. In addition, if you add optional attachments, you can transform this into a versatile lawn care tool that lets you trim hedges, sweep away debris and even cultivate the soil in your garden.

This weed eater has easy-to-find controls and an adjustable handle. Perhaps one of its most noteworthy features is its useful and large 17-inch cutting radius, which means you do not need to keep going back and forth over the same area to mow down weeds and tall grass. A wide cutting radius is a real timesaver.

You get a debris shield with this string trimmer that prevents any bits of vegetation from flying around and ending up on your face and clothes. You can easily extend the trimmer line simply by bumping the head on the ground to produce additional string.

Although it certainly presents advantages, there are a few items lacking in this gas weed trimmer. At 12.4 pounds, this is the second-heaviest strimmer we tested. It also takes some time to assemble once out of the box.

In addition, it is not outfitted with anti-vibration features to protect your hands, wrists and arms. When we tested it, the Troy-Bilt got the second-lowest Vibration Score. Exposure to heavy vibrations can cause fatigue and muscle strain in the short term and permanent damage if your hands experience this extensively over a long period of time.

When it comes to warranties, the Troy-Bilt TB32 EC Straight Shaft Gas String Trimmer is protected by the industry standard, which is two years for parts and labor and two years for the drive shaft.

If you need assistance, you can first check the online manual. If that does not work, you can call the manufacturer or take the weed eater to a service center. Unfortunately, this is one of two weed whackers in our product lineup that does not offer email support.

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Data Robotics Drobo Pro



The iSCSI support isn't the only card the Drobo Pro has up its sleeve. It also supports RAID, and in a way that makes it absurdly simple to manage compared to alternative products, using a technology that Data Robotics calls BeyondRAID.
The best way to explain what BeyondRAID has to offer is to describe how we configured the Drobo Pro in our Labs. The first step was, clearly, to add some storage to the empty box — but, unlike other storage arrays, you can use any SATA drives you like, and in any combination of capacity and spin speed. We grabbed some drives left over from previous reviews and simply slid them into place. Furthermore, we didn't have to configure anything — just plug in the bare disks and leave BeyondRAID to handle that side of things.
Start with two drives, and BeyondRAID will mirror them. Add more and it automatically upgrades to RAID 5 striping, with the data rebuilt and the array reconfigured in the background while you carry on working. There's no need to power down, and you don't need a screwdriver or special disk carriers. Plus, if you run out of storage space all you have to do is either slip in an extra drive or replace an existing disk with a bigger one.
The only time we had to do any work ourselves was to protect against two disks failing at the same time (RAID 6). Even then, it involved little more than a tick-box option on the bundled Dashboard management tool, and this can be just as simply turned off again if the extra space required becomes an issue.
To access the storage, we used the cables provided to connect the Drobo Pro directly to a PC, just like attaching an ordinary external hard disk. Networking was just as easy — simply a matter of attaching the Drobo Pro to the LAN then firing up the built-in Microsoft iSCSI initiator on the Windows servers and workstations we wanted to connect. A custom initiator for Apple Mac systems is also provided.
Either way, it's then just a matter of creating the Smart Volumes that you want to host on the array. Here, again, the Drobo Pro takes care of all the hard work, assigning blocks to these virtual volumes as required rather than pre-allocating storage in advance. Known as thin provisioning, this means you configure up to sixteen Smart Volumes, each up to 16TB in size, even though the biggest SATA disk available at present is just 2TB, limiting the physical array to a maximum of 16TB until bigger drives are released.
We found it all incredibly easy to use, with no need to get involved in management other than the odd glance at the LED indicators on the front. These show how much free storage space is left, and warns you when to consider changing a disk for something bigger, and when to leave well alone because the Drobo Pro is busy optimising your data.
There are faster and more expandable disk arrays on the market, but the Drobo Pro has enough capacity for most small to medium-sized companies, and is certainly no slouch. Performance will depend on a variety of factors, not least the speed of the disks you use and the way you connect up the Drobo Pro. As such it's probably not a good idea to use old disks like we did, but start with brand-new drives and go for fast spin speeds across the board.
If you do decide to mix disk capacities, bear mind that BeyondRAID will need to reserve the capacity of the largest drive for parity (the largest two drives if RAID 6 is enabled). Data Robotics provides a handy online calculator to determine usable capacity for different drive configurations. In our tests, iSCSI networking gave the best results, and we'd recommend steering clear of the USB interface for direct connection as it could easily become a bottleneck.
We were a little disappointed to find that the USB port can't be used to take backups of the array, and as already mentioned there's no NAS sharing. We also had to dig a little to find out what powers the Drobo Pro — if you're interested, it's a dual-core Marvell ARM processor running the VxWorks OS. But that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the Drobo Pro is a business-class storage array that does exactly what the company's marketing claims — manage itself.