September 16th, 2009

Time to ditch the optical drive, once and for all

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:03 am

Categories: Hard drive, MacBook Pro, SSD

Tags: Hard Drive, Apple Macintosh, Optical Drive, Blu-Ray, Personal Technology, DVD, Home Entertainment, Jason D. O'Grady

Once heralded as the second coming of data storage, the sun has finally set on the optical drive as an effective vehicle for data storage and delivery. Optical drives are simply too small and too slow to be practical. Single layer discs hold 4.7GB while double layer discs can hold 5.4GB.

Blu-Ray has more capacity, but its 25GB (single layer) and 50GB (double layer) doesn’t hold a candle to the capacity of even a medium-size hard drive, let alone the 500GB monsters that have dropped as low as $100.

Apple hasn’t released a Mac with a Blu-Ray drive, nor does Apple have support for Blu-Ray baked into Mac OS X. So even if you attach an external Blu-Ray drive to your Mac, you can only use if for reading and writing. You can’t play a BD movie, for example, on Mac OS X unless you install a virtual copy of Windows. If Apple released Blu-Ray drives in Macs tomorrow, a case could be made for keeping optical drives in MacBooks a little longer — for watching movies on a plane, for example.

At best the venerable optical drive is showing signs of age, at worst, it has one foot in the grave.

Apple needs to bury the optical drive next to the floppy drive, which Steve Jobs summarily killed with the announcement of the original bondi blue iMac in 1998. The future is to replace optical drive with flash media and downloads.

Snow Leopard should have been distributed on a flash drive and via BitTorrent.

I decided to take a leap of faith and installed an OptiBay hard drive (pictured above) from MCE Technologies in my MacBook Pro (late 2009) in place of the optical drive. Prices range from $189 for 250GB to $279 for a 7200RPM 500GB and the installation itself was easy. Just remove the bottom case, remove three screws, the optical drive and put the OptiBay in its place. Having a second hard drive in my MBP gives me gratuitous amounts of storage in place of an optical drive I barely used. From the OptiBay product page:

Now you can have unheard of capacities in laptop disk storage and space for everything you need to store… digital video, music, photos, etc. Two bootable hard drives inside your system provide a freedom and flexibility never before experienced in a Mac laptop… have one disk a scratch disk and the other your system/applications disk, RAID configurations, one disk Mac and the other PC, extra photo storage for digital photographers, extra music storage for digital DJ’s, and more.

If you’re worried about losing your optical drive, fear not. MCE includes an external optical drive enclosure for your removed SuperDrive so that you’ll still be able to load software and read and write CD/DVD discs to your heart’s content. Just pop your old optical drive into the enclosure, install two screws and you have a USB powered external SuperDrive. I’m keeping mine in my backback for a while, just in case.

Immediately after formatting the OptiBay 500GB HDD (a speedy Seagate Momentus 7200.4 mechanism) the first thing I did was move my music (100GB) and photo (30GB) libraries to my new found storage. Next I moved a 40GB VMWare virtual machine to the second hard drive for a combined savings of about 170GB. Whew! My SSD finally has some breathing room and I don’t have to constantly use Disk Inventory X to save space.

For people used to large mobile hard drives, a second HDD may not exactly be compelling. However, if you’ve made the jump to using an SSD as your boot drive, a second hard drive in place of the optical drive is a practically a necessity. SSDs can instantly double the performance of your Mac but they cost significantly more than HDDs. The great news is you don’t have to sacrifice capacity in exchange for raw speed. You can have the best of both worlds with an SSD and an OptiBay HDD installed in your MacBook Pro.

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June 23rd, 2009

Mac HFS+ read-write support for Windows

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 11:12 am

Categories: Hard drive, Software, Storage, Windows, Windows PC

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Desktops, Apple Mac OS, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware, David Morgenstern

Storage utility software vendor Paragon Software Group on Tuesday said it had tweaked its Universal File System Driver technology to support Mac volumes on Windows systems. The driver is in beta release.

The company said its Paragon HFS for Windows beta driver will support read-write functions for Mac OS X volumes; it will not support older Mac Classic volumes. In addition, there is no limits to maximum file/partition sizes (other than the usual Mac and Windows limits).

It is well known that Windows cannot read from and write to HFS+ partitions. This limits the ability to exchange or share files between Windows and Mac OS X file systems? Occasionally, users will rely on the services of FAT partitions which can be read and written to by both Windows and Mac OS X. FAT partitions have disadvantages and limitations as well (i.e. you can not store/create files greater than 4GB in size). Moreover, what if your data is already stored on Mac-formatted partitions but you don’t have time or tools to migrate to Windows-formatted partition (NTFS) to preserve the integrity of the data?

Paragon HFS for Windows is designed to provide full (read and write) access to HFS+ partitions. It can be installed on all versions of Windows, and eliminates the need to use complex processes on different platforms, thus reducing  your incurred costs.

February 12th, 2009

29 screws

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 8:03 am

Categories: Hard drive, Hardware, MacBook Pro

Tags: Hard Drive, Screw, MBP, Jason D. O'Grady

Last night I had the pleasure of installing a hard drive in the new “unibody” MacBook Pro, and it seems strange to even type those words after years of fighting with the 29 screws required to replace the HDD on the previous generation of MacBook Pro.

Yesterday I took delivery of a new MacBook Pro (anti-glare) from TechRestore – which I have dubbed the MatteBook Pro – and I love it. The first order of business was to remove the HDD from my old MBP and install it in my new ride. It took about 20 minutes and 29 screws (25, plus four on the HDD itself) to extract the drive from the old and a single screw to replace the HDD on the new unibody MBP. Technically it’s five screws if you count the four on the HDD itself.

What a breath of fresh air.

Previously I kept a printed copy of the iFixIt.com takeapart guide for the MBP in my tools drawer so that I could quickly replace the HDD (a task I do often) without worrying about losing a screw or missing a step. I also keep a piece of “egg crate” foam handy for screw storage. Another ritual was noting the date and what HDD I swapped on the iFixIt cheat sheet. Looking back, I swapped my MBP hard drive eight times in a little over two years and I suspect there are a couple of times I forgot to log.

Conservatively, that means that I’ve screwed/unscrewed 464 screws in my old MBP (29 screws * 2 * 8 times). Suffice it to say that I’m ecstatic that Apple has made this process so easy after all these years.

I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the (albeit boring) process above.

Disclosure: TechRestore is a PowerPage sponsor.

January 28th, 2009

Seagate offers drive firmware fix for Macs

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 1:19 pm

Categories: Hard drive, Hardware

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Firmware Update, Firmware, Seagate Technology LLC, Seagate Knowledge Base Document, David Morgenstern

Discovered in the late fall, a firmware problem in Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 platform can result in your drive “becoming inaccessible after a power-off/on operation,” or in other words, becoming an expensive brick. The company offered a fix but it required a Windows machine. Now, there’s a process for Mac users.

I pointed out this issue with Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 drives back in November.  And since then, I have been pinging their tech support about a Mac-related fix — their support tools and firmware update required a Windows machine.

MacTech on Wednesday offered a pointer to Seagate’s solution. Still, it will take some digging and the final solution is far from Mac-elegant.

The Seagate Knowledge Base document is titled Firmware-Empfehlungen für die Festplatten Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA und DiamondMax 22 [207931].

Owners can see the full model number and serial number of connected ATA drives by clicking on Serial-ATA in the Hardware menu of the System Profile utility. However, it won’t give you the firmware version (unlike SCSI drives, for those readers old enough to have used them).

Seagate says to check the drive in its online model number tool and serial number tool, which will tell you if your drive needs a firmware update.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 29th, 2008

Man, have drive prices come down!

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:48 am

Categories: Hard drive, Hardware

Tags: USB 2.0, Newegg.com, eSATA, USB, Specs, Jason D. O'Grady

I’ve been hearing people mention 1TB drive mechanisms on NewEgg.com for around $99 on TWIP and the like, but haven’t been in the market for new, internal drives. Currently NewEgg has a bunch of cheap 1TB options ranging from $100 (WD Caviar GP) to $120 (Caviar Green).

A friend just tipped me off to a 1TB external hard drive for $90 from Buy.com. This is the lowest I’ve seen for an external 1TB drive. Specs are: 7200RPM, 16GB cache, 8.5ms access time.

The USB 2.0 interface is capable of up to 60MB/sec transfer rates while the eSATA interface is capable of up to 300MB/sec transfer rates. This products features sturdy aluminum casing to provide maximum durability, fanless design for silent operation…

The drive has USB 2.0 and eSATA interfaces so it’ll work on any Mac, but it doesn’t have Firewire so take that into consideration before jumping.

Anyone know what mechanism it uses?

(Tip: Glen DaSilva)

November 26th, 2008

Seagate offers fix for problematic Barracuda drives on Mac/Linux systems

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 4:19 pm

Categories: Hard drive, Repair

Tags: Firmware, Seagate Technology LLC, David Morgenstern

Earlier this month, a warning went out about problems with Seagate’s Barracuda 8200.11 hard drives with a capacity of 1.5 terabytes. While the initial warning was sounded for all operating systems, it may be that the issue was more for Mac and Linux users. Seagate this week told storage vendors that a firmware fix is available.

My colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes sounded the alarm in a post. It appeared that the drives would hang for a few seconds, which is an eternity in terms of your data or for a video stream.

I’ve been hearing sporadic reports of this problem since the drive was released and attempts to get Seagate to comment in the past have been unsuccessful. It’s a good sign that the company finally acknowledges that there’s a problem with these drives.

On a list for storage pros, I noticed that a Seagate representative had posted news of a fix. However, you will have to go through Seagate tech support to receive the firmware update.

For those of you who are not aware, Seagate has put a fix in place for the Barracuda 1.5TB issue reported in the blogosphere and several shopping forums. Please feel free to share the following information with your readers:

Some Seagate Barracuda 8200.11 1.5TB hard drives may show uncharacteristic operation when used with Mac and Linux operating systems in multi-drive configurations. Users may experiences pauses in video streaming applications or a dropped drive from RAID arrays. Customers seeing these symptoms should contact Seagate Technical Support for a firmware upgrade.

In order to assure the proper application of the new firmware, please email a description of the issues you’re seeing to Seagate(discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision.

Also, please describe your system, operating system and the application in use when the issue arose, and you will receive a prompt response with appropriate instructions.

October 27th, 2008

The perfect external HDD for the Mac mini

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 9:59 pm

Categories: Accessory, Hard drive, Hardware

Tags: Hard Drive, Apple Macintosh, Apple Intel Mac Mini, Media Center PC, USB, Media Center PCs, FireWire, Home Entertainment, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

Like a lot of people, I have a Mac mini connected to my home entertainment system. It’s great for watching movies, viewing photos and listening to music but the problem is the mini’s anemic hard drive.

The Mac mini is only available with a 80, 120 or 160GB hard drive – which is hardly enough space for a serious media center. Previously I used a garden-variety external FireWire drive which worked but was difficult to connect and disconnect because my mini is in pretty tight quarters.

I’ve been testing Newer Technology’s new miniStack v2.5, a combination hard drive and USB/FireWire hub that starts at US$105 (80GB) and goes up to US$230 (1TB). The miniStack footprint (6.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches) is the exact same as the Mac mini, making them stack perfectly.

The miniStack combines powered FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 hubs and external hard drive in one convenient package. It comes with the Oxford 934 bridge chipset, and a 7200RPM Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives up to 1.0TB with up to 32MB of disk cache.

The single best feature for me is the side mounted USB and FireWire ports which make it easy to  connect and disconnect drives to my mini in my crowded media center cabinet.

September 25th, 2008

The mother of all notebook hard drives: Scorpio Blue

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 1:39 pm

Categories: Hard drive, Hardware, MacBook, MacBook Pro

Tags: Hard Drive, Mechanism, Apple MacBook, Apple MacBook Pro, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

I’m totally psyched that someone has finally released a 500GB hard drive that fits in my MacBook Pro. That someone is Western Digital. WD just announced its WD5000BEVT mobile hard drive, a.k.a. the Scorpio Blue with a huge 500GB capacity.

The 500GB barrier was broken earlier this year by Hitachi, Samsung and Fujitsu but their mechanisms are 12mm tall and only fit in the 17-inch MacBook Pro. The MBP 15-inch and MacBook 13-inch require a 9.5mm HDD mechanism and previous to the Scorpio Blue, the largest 9.5mm drive you could get was 320GB

The Scorpio Blue is a 5400RPM mechanism that features 12 ms access time and up to 3 Gb/s SATA interface speed. It also comes with WD’s ShockGuard and SecurePark. MSRP for the WD Scorpio Blue is US$220 (500GB) and US$190 (400GB) and they’ll be shipping imminently.

July 7th, 2008

Apple drops Solid State Drive price by US$400

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 7:41 am

Categories: Hard drive, Hardware, MacBook Air, SSD

Tags: Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., Solid State Disk, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

Apple dropped the price of the Solid State Drive (SSD) option in its MacBook Air subnotebook computer on Thursday by US$400. Previously available as a US$999 upcharge, the 64GB SSD option can now be added to the MBA for US$599. You can see the price drop when you configure a MacBook Air in Apple’s online store. I think that the price is still about US$100 too high, but then again, I’ve switched to a MacBook Pro for my day-to-day computing anyway.

For more on the pros and cons of SSDs refer to my previous coverage.

Apple has also dropped the price of the faster processor option in the MBA slightly too. Previously going from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz set you back US$300, now it’s only a US$200 premium to get the faster chip. Could this be a sign that Apple is clearing out inventory for a new model? Doubtful as the MacBook Air was announced less than six months ago on 15 January 2008.

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June 17th, 2008

Western Digital releases 7200RPM 320GB notebook drive

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 11:53 am

Categories: Accessory, Hard drive

Tags: Hard Drive, Mobile, Sensor, Western Digital Corp., WD Black, Notebooks, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Jason D. O'Grady

Western Digital has raised the bar on the notebook hard drives with their new “Black” line of Scorpio drives. The new 2.5-inch SATA WD3200BEKT hard drives spin at 7200RPM which is faster than their 5400RPM (WD3200BEVT) Scorpio drives that I reviewed on 16 November 2007.

The new 7200RPM WD Scorpio Black 2.5-inch mobile drives are 9.5mm high – so they’ll fit into the MacBook and MacBook Pro – and they come in several capacities, including: 320, 250, 160, 120 and 80GB. The WD3200BEKT 320GB bare drive sells for US$229.95 and is expected to ship on 20 June 2008.

In addition to the BEKT drives, WD also offers a BJKT model that includes a new free-fall sensor.

Free-fall sensor - As an added layer of protection, if the drive (or the system it’s in) is dropped while in use, WD’s free-fall sensor detects that the drive is falling and, in less than 200 milliseconds, parks the head to help prevent damage and data loss.

Traditionally mobile hard drive buyers had to choose between speed and capacity because the larger drives weren’t available in 7200RPM speeds. The WD Black drives have filled that gap with a new super-fast, high-capacity drive that notebook users are going to jump all over. I’m cloning my data over to the new 320GB/7200RPM screamer the minute that I finish this post.