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Hakko FR-300 Review

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FR300-05I often find myself repairing electronics that have blown caps, or bad switches, or worse, a bad IC that has 14 to 28 legs. Caps you can cheat and heat one leg, then the other, and work them out (this can be risky, as you risk lifting a pad), and ICs you can cut all the legs and then remove the legs one at a time, but this always felt… desperate. So, when I had the chance to buy a desoldering gun, I jumped on the Hakko FR-300. It replaces the oldy but goody Hakko 808 that people often complained about a short power cord, and other small things. Anyway, Hakko seems to addressed all of these with the FR-300, as it is… awesome.

Since purchasing the unit, I’ve done several cap replacements, and most significantly, removal of 34 tactile switches from my Racal-Dana 1992. With a solder sucker, or solder-wick, this would have taken an hour, easily, to do. With the Hakko FR-300, it took 10 minutes, tops. If I did charged for work, the 50 minute time savings would add up very quickly to the $240 price tag of the Hakko.

Warm-up on the unit is very quick, and cleaning is also extremely easy (though I did get a broken off pin wedged in the tip one time, and dislodging it required heating the gun up to maximum to melt all the solder that had collected around it, and using the cleaning tool to push it out. Routine cleaning is very easy, as it “loads” a bit like a real gun. You pull back a “chamber” and remove the cartridge and knock it out. Then replace.

The Hakko FR-300 desoldering gun may be my most favorite tool in my arsenal after a soldering iron. My ONLY complaint about the unit is really the price of tips. At a little over $20 each, it does become a tad expensive to have all of them, but with the stock 1.0mm, and the 1.6mm tip, I’ve been able to tackle just about any through hole component I’ve had to replace.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Update 1: My Hakko wouldn’t heat up one day, and after troubleshooting and finding the element “open circuit”, I contacted Hakko. They quickly issued me a shipping label, and I sent the unit in. They repaired under warranty, and sent it back. Total time I didn’t have the unit was a little over a week. Interestingly, after getting it back, it heats WAY faster (takes maybe 20 seconds to heat up, vs the 45-60 seconds before). Cool!

Update 2: I used the unit a lot to do the button replacement on my Racal-Dana 1992 last night, and noticed I was getting little puffs of smoke exiting the unit around the chamber and back. I contacted them about this, and they indicated this shouldn’t be happening, but rather than having me send the unit back in for repair, they’re sending me a whole new FR-300, and then I can send the old one back for them to diagnose. Awesome! Well done Hakko!

Drobo 5D Review

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Drobo 5DFor the last year I’ve had a Drobo 5D on my desk hooked to my Mac Pro. I’ve loved the unit as it’s fast, and so far, extremely reliable. I have it connected to the Mac Pro via Thunderbolt, on bus 1 ((Don’t get me started on the Thunderbolt buses on the Mac Pro. I had to move stuff around several times to get one of my monitors to NOT randomly go black now and then)). When I initially purchased the unit, I didn’t have the SSD cache installed, and had 4 2TB Western Digital (WD) Black drives in it (giving me 6TB of usable storage). The only problem I had with it was the 7200RPM drives caused a bit of vibration, so occasionally it would make noise, or anytime something was touching the body of the Drobo, it would cause a rattling. But the performance was excellent (significantly faster than my Drobo 4-bay 2nd Generation at home).

Since buying it, however, I’ve done two things. First, I purchased a Crucial 128GB mSATA SSD for it’s cache, which boosted the performance another 25% or so, and just yesterday, I upgraded to 3x WD 4TB Red drives. The biggest advantage of that being TLER support, as well as drive speed/balance. The Drobo is now “silent”, and there is no physical vibration to the enclosure at all (gotta say, I love the “Red” drives). While the spindle speed is slower ((WD doesn’t actually advertise their speed, but it has been deduced to be 5,400RPM)), the platter density is higher. This should largely even out transfer speed changes with larger files, which was evident in my data restore once I had swapped all the drives ((Tidbit: The 5D is “smart” in that if you are replacing all the drives at once, it will come up in an error state if you pull all the old hard drives out, and put in new HD’s. You have to then “reset” it to get it to recognize the new drives. This is interesting because my 2nd generation 4-bay never did this)). If you’re upgrading drives, doing a backup/restore is going to be significantly faster than swapping one drive at a time (which the Drobo will let you do, but each rebuild will probably take 24 hours to complete if you have a significantly sized volume).

Actual read/write performance on the unit is pretty good. With sequential read/writes at 145MB/sec both ways. My 4-bay 2nd generation scored about 25MB/sec each way. Random access is not based on throughput so much as IOPs. Sadly, it scores only about 100/sec in that space, but that’s not bad for a Drobo, since my old 2nd generation only scored 50/sec.

All and all, I’m very happy with the 5D. While the price point is a bit high, it really is a great external storage device. If you can afford it, I’d highly recommend it.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Update: I contacted Drobo a few days ago asking about a review unit of the new 4-bay, and sadly, heard nothing back. As “luck” would have it, though, Adorama had a sale for one for about $70 off street price, so I purchased one to upgrade my home 2nd generation Drobo. I’ll be posting a review of that new unit once I have it, and move my drives over. =)

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

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The_Hobbit_-_The_Battle_of_the_Five_ArmiesThe third of The Hobbit movies (review of the second) released last month, and I’m really at a loss as to what to say that I haven’t said to start with. This book, in it’s 300 or so pages, should NOT have been made into three movies. At 300 pages, it is about 1/3rd the length of the Lord of the Rings “Trilogy”, which was made into three movies quite successfully. I may even allow for The Hobbit to have been two movies, but at three, it was just pointless. The movie, while quite pretty, was just dull. It was nearly all CGI. While I have a very high tolerance for action sequences, this movie was quite literally an hour and a half of action. The Hobbit, specifically, was in maybe 15 minutes of the movie. And while I don’t mind some of Peter Jackson’s liberties with the stories he’s done, the fact he killed a few characters in this movie is just upsetting. Also, this movie suffered from the same problem as the first: not spending enough time with the standard 24FPS version. There were several CG scenes where everything got grainy… like they didn’t fully render/anti-alias the CG.

I honestly don’t want to review this movie beyond this. I’ll be quite generous and give it a a score based on how it looked. But really, you could easily take all 3 movies, cut out all the fat, and make a solid 3-3.5 hour movie (RoTK length), and it would be much more enjoyable.

[xrr rating=2.5/5]