Ok, so I thought I was being smart.  I bought the Promise SmartStor NS4300N in September of 2008 thinking it would give me the expansion and stability I wanted.

It’s its own machine, capable of handling up to four SATA hard drives at once and, what I really wanted, it can create a RAID mirrored drive set.  So I bought the machine and 2 500GB matching hard drives, and everything was beautiful.  All my employees and I could access the data we needed.

Then, I started to get email messages from the machine that the drives were almost full.  That didn’t make sense, and I noticed a folder was being created which was backing up the data already on the drive.  I deleted the folder, and the space was back.  This went on for months, and I couldn’t figure out if the machine was saving the data to itself, or one of the machines attached (the server) was the culprit.

So finally I emailed Promise.  They told me that I had to upgrade the firmware which was version 2 to version 5.  One at a time.  No problem.  I upgrade to version 3 and everything’s fine.  I upgrade to version 4, and everything’s fine.  I upgrade to version 5 and it won’t startup, and that’s when the nightmare begins.

I contact Promise support and, although it’s only 3:00 p.m. in California, they can’t ship a replacement unit out until the next day.  My company is down, my employees are twiddling their thumbs.  I ask for it to be sent overnight.

The next day, I go to Fry’s electronics to buy the two unit, one-step down box, thinking I would use that in the meantime.  They only have open box items, but I’m not picky – I need to get my company back up.

I get to the office and put the drives in and power it on.  Unfortunately, the person who bought and returned the unit had changed the password, so I call Promise to learn how to reset the password.

The techinician helps me reset the password.  While the technician is on the line, I ask him if I need to run the setup wizard to reset the raid for my existing drives.  He says “yes.”  I continue the setup, but stop and ask if he’s sure.  He says it’s OK to continue and I do.

After the setup, all my data is gone.  The technician then says I need to wait for the NS4300N to arrive because they have a different firmware and my data should be OK.

I wait, but the next day the unit does not appear.  I call Promise – they forgot to send the unit out.

I wait another day, and then the unit appears.  I put my drives back in, and call Promise techical support.  Alas the data was no more.  Then the technicians start to blame me and say that I had already started to create the raid array before I called them.  I reminded them that I called to reset the password to the box because I couldn’t even get into it.  That shut them up fast.

Bottom line, thanks to their technical support people I lost all of my data without even an apology.  I spent weeks restoring the data from various backups and still never recovered all of it.  I spent money on drive repair utilities, etc.

As another kick in the pants, Promise charged me $81.76 to overnight the replacement unit.  Now it’s strictly a backup device and does not hold important data.

Learning lessons:  Don’t trust Promise Technologies.  Don’t use raid arrays – use a cheap or free backup solution to backup from one drive to another.  I will write later about how my offsite backup utility failed.  Now I use JungleDisk.

I’m considering buying an Apple computer – something I haven’t done in about 20 years, so have been shopping around for the best price and came accross a site called swoopo.com which seems like the best scam ever.

This is the closest thing to legal gambling I have ever seen.

Here’s how it works.  I was searching Google on the phrase “buy mac 24″ for the 24″ imac and came across a completed sale where someone bought the 20″ mac for almost $67 (it retails for $1,200).  Here’s how swoopo makes their money.

They put up a iMac which sells for $1,200 and let’s assume they pay retail and not any discount.  The price starts at $0.01 and each “bid” raises it by one cent and also extends the bid deadline by two seconds.  They set the end date something like a few days away with an absolute deadline for the bid to end three weeks away.  In the meantime, the bidding lols until the final minute.  Then guess what, people try to bid and raise the price and the deadline. Eventually, some lucky guy gets it for $67.  So, how did Swoople sell a $1,200 iMac for $67 and make a profit (a huge one by the way)?

What I didn’t tell you is that it costs $0.75 to make a bid (er, buy a lottery ticket) and you buy your bids in bulk.  Now, let’s do the math.  $66.99 ($67 less the starting penny) is 6,699 bids.  6,699 * $0.75 = $5,024.25 – a great markup if you ask me.  So, $5,024.25 + $67 – $1,200 = $3,891.25 profit to swoople.com -> even apple should be jealous.

Of course, eventually individual bidders will give up on this type of site, but there’s a sucker born every minute as they say.

As a follow-up to my prior Rant on the Pete Report, you should know that I had to give out my mailing address to get the full report.  Ever since, I have been flooded with Junk Mail – get rich quick schemes and offer.  It seems Pete is making his money selling names and addresses.

Matt Callen, of HyperVre is about to release an incredibly powerful new software that will take your marketing to the next limit….

Hold your breath….

Keep holding…

a pop-over maker.

Ok, so the other day some guy emailed me to swap links with one of my niche sites. I sent him back an email stating he could submit the link on our eSyndicate link directory for that site. He then emailed me back – the site didn’t have a high enough PR. What gives? He contacted me first!

If you have been living under a rock, you may not have heard about Google’s toolbar with the PR feature. PR, according to Google stands for Page Rank. In reality, it stands for Public Relations – public relations for Google. This webmaster worried about the PR of the site according to Google, never mind he had found the site because it was listed in both the top two rankings in its category!

Don’t worry about the PR of a site (unless, maybe, it has a PR of 0) – worry more about whether the site’s theme fits in with your site’s theme, whether the site has good content, and whether the site can send you real visitors.

Someone emailed me that I had to read this report (I think it was the guys from Stomper.Net) so I read it.  It was … crap.  Long form sales letter without any useful information.  In fact, I think most of the information I already read in a book about the demise of the 30 second spot (commercials).

Point – The world is suffering from attention defecit disorder.  Duh.  If this is news to you, then I take it you bought your computer yesterday.

Point - Getting attention is important.  Duh.  Anyone is business knows the value of PR.

Point - Don’t sound like a marketer.  Good marketers never do.  Read Dan Kennedy.

Point – Piggyback off established people and brands.  Brilliant – why didn’t Nike think of that.

Point – Social networking is on the rise and you can’t cheat the customer.  All been said in the book “The 30 Second Spot.” Anyway, even offline, you can’t succeed in the long run if you cheat your customers.

Point – Give out free content to build trust and build yourself as an authority with free reports.   Gee, I’ve never seen that before.

Point – Use controversy and stories to launch a product.  I think there’s a whole book about this called “Made to Stick.”

The final point – buy my tools.

Sheesh.

I read The Pete Report the other day. Typical crap. Long form sales letter. The gist is something like this:

I’m like you. I was poor and had a goat farm investment (that was the interesting part). All the gurus lied to me and they’re lying to you. Finally, I found someone who helped me make it online. Now you can too – if you pay me I’ll tell you how.

I’m so sick of reading the same teaser copy with no useful information. If you’re new to the internet and want to make money, I’m sorry to bust your bubble but it does take either work or money. Money if you want to pay other people and work if you don’t have the money (and probably a bit of both).

I suggest anyone doing anything on the internet, even if you’re quite experienced, try the 30 Day Challenge. Ed Dale is one of the few honest internet marketers that I would trust. When I get a chance, I’ll throw up a review for the Immediate Edge (not for beginners).