Black belt

Our son, Aidan, was awarded his black belt in karate yesterday. He's ten years old, and has been attending the Tiger Schulmann karate school in Watchung, NJ since he was five. It's a great school with two wonderful mentors, Sensei Querido and Sensei Holland.

During the kickboxing part of his black belt test, five rounds of two minutes, Aidan had to fight a girl about his age. It was a great fight with both being very aggressive. Later Aidan told me he didn't want to fight the girl. When I asked him why, he said it was because he wanted her to get her black belt.

Well, they both got their black belts. I need to remember his words, because they are so kind.

Aidan matured a lot yesterday. He also said he had fun.

Building an external SATA RAID array

Last week I decided to build an external RAID array to faciltate video capture and editing. I looked around and settled on SATA drives (big and cheap - $119 for a 250 GB Hitachi from newegg.com), a Sonnet Tempo-X SATA host card, and a Burly 4 drive SATA enclosure from MacGurus. The Sonnet card has four external and four internal SATA ports, will work in a PCI or PCI-X slot, and is compatible with G4 and G5 Macs. However, the card is not compatible with hot-swapping of the drives. The Burly enclosure was reasonably priced ($254) and looked sturdy. I picked the Hitachi drives because I have a bunch of them and I've never had any trouble.

I purchased four drives and the Tempo card from newegg.com, and the 4 drive Burly enclosure. Last night I put the drives in, inserted the PCI card into my G4 dual processor MDD, and cabled up. Each drive is connected to an individual channel in the Tempo card. I powered up and four dialog boxes came up, asking to initialize the drives. Clicking yes brought up Disk Utility; I configured a striped RAID array with all four. In a few minutes I had a 1 TB RAID array mounted and ready to go. Total time to assemble and mount, just over one hour.

We'll see how this performs in coming days. So far the experience has been excellent.