The cute little hacintosh we’ve all come to love is now a little bit cuter with new system color options. In addition to Black and White you can now get Cherry Red, Pretty Pink, or 5 different sticker options. Choosing a sticker will add time to shipping, but the Red and Pink configurations appear to be shipping as fast as 2 weeks from now.
The other major add is that you can now also swap out the SSD for a 32GB version for only an extra $25 (over the cost of the 16GB). I’ll be curious to see if it fixes the Leopard sleep mode. A fully configured red model with 32GB and the web camera came to $499. Anyone want to buy a configured Leopard Dell Mini 9? We’re in the mood to upgrade.
Here’s my question of the day: I have a popcorn hour in my home theatre, which works ok. But it doesn’t have a slick user interface. I also need to get some kind of media player for my daughter’s room. She can’t read yet – so that one has to have an interface where she can pick through pictures of shows. Before anyone gets set off by the idea of a 3 year old having video on demand in her room, let me add that I’m an involved parent and can set restrictions and all that.. blah-blah-blah. But on Saturday morning when I want to sleep in it’s golden. (Don’t judge!) Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a few weeks since I talked about storage solutions. I’m getting closer to purchasing a solution for my home/office, which will undoubtedly be a raid hanging off of eSata. I’ve used a few different eSata towers and will eventually talk about each of these solutions. Today I’m going to cover one of the better ones – the G-SPEED eS from G-Technology.
The G-SPEED eS is a mini-tower with 4 removable drive modules. With current drives it provides an unformatted capacity of 4 TB. It attaches to a Mac or PC via one eSata cable. The typical package comes with an PCIe eSata raid controller, which is the host adaptor and handles the raid management. This particular raid card has 4 eSata ports, meaning that it can handle 4 G-SPEED’s. It is therefore possible to raid 16 TB drives together providing a reported 600 MB/sec. (Although I have not invested the 6 grand to verify this speed – and you know how much I hate just repeating advertised bandwidth – so YMMV).
Once it’s set up as a RAID 5, your local system sees it as one volume and a single drive failure should not cause data loss. The bad drive module can be replaced and the RAID will rebuild itself. I’ve not dissected this particular model, but generally a module is just a tray that the raw eSata drive screws onto, which makes for easy replacement and upgrade. Read the rest of this entry »
BlackFriday.info has Black Friday deals posted early. Black Friday, in case you don’t know, is the day after Thanksgiving and is the biggest shopping day of the year. I found this Dell ad there which shows the Dell Mini 9 for $299 – which is $50 off. Interesting that an intel Core 2 Duo icon is right next to the ad when the Mini doesn’t have a Core 2 Duo it has an intel Atom. But I guess the logo is referring to the Inspiron 1525 in the ad above it. Read the rest of this entry »
The big project this weekend was setting up my wife’s “couch computer” (netbook). After about a month of waiting the Dell Mini 9 finally arrived. I spent most of the day Saturday working on it. I also videotaped much of the process and made you this lovely video:
Watch it in HD over at vimeo. It’s much better in HD. Vimeo won’t let me embed HD without paying.
Overall I would say that the process was easy but is not for the weak. While I edited around it on the video, I made a few mistakes along the way – which is why it took all day to do. If I were to do it again it would go much quicker. Below I’ve listed links to the instructions and tools. I’ve also explained all of the pitfalls and how to avoid them, and what works and what doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
Continuing my series of reviewing every hard drive solution I’ve ever touched, I want to talk about the Vantec NexStar. Not only this particular hard drive dock but the general concept, the goods and bads about it, including some benchmarks.
I’ve always like the idea of the hard drive dock. Recently I needed to back up a massive amount of data and was on a tight budget to do it. I purchased 5 of these NexStar docks for about $35$39 a piece, and a box of 1 TB hard drives. The dock works by plugging your favorite raw SATA drive right in to the top (like a Nintendo Cart). It has a power button on the front and USB and eSATA connections on the back. Vantec makes other versions, one with the addition of FireWire. Mine performed very well. In practice, using the eSATA connection I was able to fill up a TB in about 3 hours. When I started having problems with my FreeAgent drive I did benchmarks on all of these solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
A few years ago I moved towards eSATA connectivity for drives. SATA (or Serial ATA) is the connection that is on the actual drive and has blazing fast transfer speeds up to 3Gb/sec. The concept is that whatever drive enclosure you buy has some sort of interface card that ‘converts’ SATA to USB or Firewire. That’s the definition of a bandwidth bottleneck. Using SATA to SATA connectivity should eliminate any bottleneck and give you the full bandwidth of the drive. eSATA is simply an external version of the SATA connector. I’ll do more detailed explanations in later posts, but in general to use eSATA you need a PCI host adaptor card and a drive with an eSATA connection.
I was excited when the FreeAgent Pro came out because of the eSata connectivity. I got a great deal and paid around 100 bucks at Fry’s for a 1TB model. Every other article I’ve seen of the FreeAgent Pro drive gives it a rave review and claims that the 3Gb/sec is blazing fast. It should be – but it’s not. It’s also important to note that these reviewers probably never tested the eSATA connection for speed. They’re just quoting the Seagate data sheet – even using the same word to describe it. If they actually tested it or benchmarked it they would report honestly on how the drive is actually performing. No single drive (today) performs at 3Gb/s because that is the maximum burst bandwidth of the drive interface. In practice you’re average is going to max out at 1/4 – 1/3 that rate.
Seagate’s datasheet on the (now) FreeAgent Pro Classic has this to say: “It provides eSATA connectivity at blazing speeds up to 3Gb/sec, FireWire® 400 connectivity for Macs and digital video users, as well as USB 2.0 connectivity, the most commonly used interface in the world today.”
The drive seemed fine to me until I tried copying a large chunk of video files to it using the eSATA connection. A copy function that should have taken only an hour or so was claiming that it would take 30 hours! So I decided to start taking some benchmarks and get to the bottom of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »
By far the best and most reliable portable drive I’ve used is the G-Raid series by G-Technology. I have 4 of them, some are 4 – 5 years old, and they all still work great.
Internally, G-Raid has two 3.5″ SATA drives that are striped together using RAID level 0 for speed. The stripe management is all handled inside the box. The mac sees it as one volume. Therefore if you have a 500GB G-Raid, inside is two 250GB drives. These arrays are very fast and can handle multiple streams of DVCPRO HD. I edited a show in FCP at 720P and never experienced any drop frames. From a reliability standpoint I’ve never had any hardware problems with them but have seen the typical mac volume problems. However I’ve never had any data loss from it.
G-Tech now has a version 2 of this drive with ‘Triple Interface’ FireWire 400, 800 and USB 2.0. Newer drives get up to 2TB capacity for under $550.
Now let’s examine the disadvantages. The main concern is that with 2 drives striped together you are risking up to 2TB of data with twice as many chances of a hardware failure. If either of the two physical hard drives inside the box die you lose all the data on both drives. If you’re using them for media and have the tapes as a backup – it might be an acceptable a low risk. Like I said, I’ve never had data loss.
As part of my “moving forward” theme (out with the old) I’m trying to lower the risks of data loss. I will most likely be selling my G-Raid drives in favor of a larger safer total solution. Since this solution will likely be based on a sata connection, I might keep one for transporting files.
There are other newer G-Tech solutions such as the G-Speed which I’ll talk about another day.
The cute little hacintosh we’ve all come to love is now a little bit cuter with new system color options. In addition to Black and White you can now get Cherry Red, Pretty Pink, or 5 different sticker options. Choosing a sticker will add time to shipping, but the Red and Pink configurations appear to be shipping as fast as 2 weeks from now.
The other major add is that you can now also swap out the SSD for a 32GB version for only an extra $25 (over the cost of the 16GB). I’ll be curious to see if it fixes the Leopard sleep mode. A fully configured red model with 32GB and the web camera came to $499. Anyone want to buy a configured Leopard Dell Mini 9? We’re in the mood to upgrade.
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