Nick Taylors blog

I’m trying to spend some money with Garmin, but they won’t let me.

I’m a fan of Garmin GPS receivers, particularly devices like the GPSMap 478, a wonderful chart-plotting GPS. I also have a StreetPilot 7500, a nice large-screen GPS that I use in the truck. I’ve spend thousands on Garmin hardware and maps since my first Garmin device, a GPS 12, back in 1995. If you count the devices I’ve bought for others and my referrals that total is well north of $10,000.

A while ago, maybe in mid-late 2007, Garmin updated their internal systems at my.garmin.com. I had multiple GPSes registered with them, including the StreetPilot 7500. The old system was never brilliant, I blame the DRM they have around the mapping data, but that’s another subject…

Anyway, I want to upgrade the 7500 to the latest version of City Navigator North America NT, the 2009 update. To unlock the maps, you have to have a registered device. During Garmins update to my.garmin.com my previously registered 7500 disappeared. Now, when I try to register it again my.garmin.com rejects my serial number.

I’ve been extremely happy with Garmin support through the years, in fact they managed to next day me a replacement mapping CDROM when I was out of the country, starting trans-Sahara trip, to replace a damaged disk. They have been pretty responsive so far with my registration problem, until I received this today (the issue had been passed to their IT department)

We have contacted our IT department and requested another update. To answer your questions:

We have stressed the importance of getting this matter resolved and I am hopeful that we can get this matter resolved quickly. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

As this issue has been outstanding for 3 weeks, I’d love to know what the “IT Department” are doing. The very phrase makes my blood run cold, and I’m in IT guy! Some transparency would be greatly appreciated.

Ideally, I’d like to know what IT have done in the 2 weeks since they received this ticket from their support guys, what they are planning to do and why they can’t escalate it.

Remember, all I want to do is give them about $100 for new maps. All I need is a valid serial number.

I hope I don’t have to start buying and recommending other brands if they can’t resolve this. If anyone from Garmin feels like helping, the case number is KMM12787676I15977L0KM. Thanks!

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had problems with my 2nd generation Drobo. I’m not the only one.

I have to say, Valorie in Drobo tech support did a great job handling my case. It seems that it may be a PSU problem (yes, just like my Lacie drives!). Both the Drobo and the Lacies come with cheap Chinese-made PSUs.

As you can see from the photo, it should be capable of outputting 6.7A at 12V. My multimeter said 12.36V, though I’ve no way of measuring the current draw when active. Drobo support said that the 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar HUA721010KLA330 drives are a known “power hog”. The drive itself states a current draw of 850mA (I have 2 installed, the other 2 are 750GB Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS, with a stated draw of 520mA, so there could be some truth in that. If this is the case, I know from personal experience that it’s possible for multiple restarts to corrupt volume information resulting in data being lost.

They are sending me a new PSU, so we’ll know soon enough.

Earlier in the year I noticed that my Eberspächer HYDRONIC D5 auxiliary heater wasn’t working. As the weather was warming up, getting it fixed slid down the priority list.

A couple of weeks ago, during a trip to the Maze, the plastic t-piece from the fuel tank to both the fuel lift pump and the heater snapped.

Here I am fixing it in the field (I discovered that the outer diameter of the raised breather tubes is the same as the interior diameter of the fuel line). Thanks to Steve for the photo.

So as I need to refit the t-piece (with a brass one this time), I stared investigating the rest of the problem. Once I’d freed up the harness, I discovered that it has shorted and melted some of the wires together – never good. It also seems that there’s a fuse missing, that would have been easier to replace than the harness.

In the diagram below, you can see the part that failed. I need to replace both the plug and socket – it’s a tight 8-way connector.

Once I discovered that Eberspächer is called Espar in North America, I contacted their technical support and got the following part number: 22 1000 30 10 21 – which has to be ordered from a local dealer. I contacted Thermo King of Denver who ordered the part from Espar in Canada. I’m hoping the thing will be fixed before it really gets cold!

Espar D5 manual here
Good install thread on D90.com here
A Defender installation here

I’ve recently bought a 2nd generation Drobo. It’s a cool little box that attaches to my Mac Pro via Firewire 800.

I had some drives from my failing ReadyNAS 600 (now retired), so after temporarily copying the data to a non-resilient drive I loaded the following in the the Drobo and copied the data onto it.

Slot 0: 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330
Slot 1: 1TB Hitachi HUA721010KLA330
Slot 2: Seagate 750GB ST3750640NS
Slot 3: Seagate 750GB ST3750640NS

These are good quality SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives that I even ran through SpinRite (highly recommended) to check for errors.

Anyway, I’ve discovered that when I unlock my Mac Pro (the screensaver automatically locks after a while, but I don’t put it to sleep), the Drobo restarts. No warning, just a whirring reboot. I’m running the 1.2.2 firmware and the 1.2.1 dashboard. I’ve tried plugging it into another Firewire port and also unplugging my other Firewire devices with no luck.

I’ve logged a support ticket with Drobo, let’s see what they come up with.

No sooner had I wrote about my ReadyNAS 600 being without problems, the fan fails on me. As both the Infrant and Netgear stores didn’t have the replacement available, and after seeing the posts in this thread I looked at NewEgg and ordered the following:

SILVERSTONE RL-FX121 Case Fan – Retail
NewEgg Item#:N82E16835220002

It cost $16.59 (but about $20 to overnight). It’s a straight swap and fits perfectly.

I’ve never had a problem with my 2 original ReadyNAS 600 devices. The ReadyNAS NV, though, well, it’s not been smooth. I’ve had a couple of drive failures, had to perform a service action and last week the Power Supply failed, with a smoky smell!

Infrant, actually now Netgear, support were great. I’d read a bit of background to the problem on the forums, and they shipped a replacement out the same day. I replaced it today, and it’s still working!

“Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 3. Please replace the failed disk as soon as possible”

The second disk to fail in 5 months – another HDS HDS724040KLSA80 7K400 GB Deskstar. I’m replacing it with a Seagate Barracuda ES ST3750640NS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (from NewEgg).

“Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 2. Please replace the failed disk as soon as possible.”

We like the ReadyNAS too! It was a HDS HDS724040KLSA80 7K400 GB Deskstar that failed.