Archive for Hardware category

MacBook Pro 256GB SSD upgrade experience

April 9th 2010 • Apple, Hardware (crucial, mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, ssd) • 14,087 views • 16 responses

I’ve been wanting an SSD for some time and last week I caved. Armed with credit card, screwdriver and trusty MacBook Pro I fitted a sweet SSD and decided to document the experience.

Choosing a drive

There are a bewildering number of options out there. Budget, as always, dictates the combination of speed and size available.

Size

You may not need as much space as you think so even if you intend on a fresh install clean-up your current drive to get an idea of requirements.

Remembering to backup before:

1. Identify biggest culprits
   Try DaisyDisk ($19) or Disk Inventory X (free) and drill down to catch unexpected bloat in your music library, videos etc.
2. Clean up unused system junk
   Use CleanMyMac ($30) or MonoLingual (free) to clean up logs as well as redundant processor and language support.
3. Archive unused content
   Move those podcasts, TV shows, applications and games you aren’t going to use again to cheap external drives.
4. Deal with orphaned & duplicate files
   Find media in your iTunes folders missing from iTunes lists and either trash or add it back then use iTune’s Display Duplicates.

If you’re prepared to sacrifice your DVD drive then you can move your existing hard drive to the optical bay via an adaptor and purchase a smaller SSD for the OS and key performance-critical files. This saves cash and gives you more space but will cost you battery life.

Speed

SSDs are not created equal and the combination of flash and controller (on drive and in your machine) play a part in defining performance. Firmware, hardware revisions, drive size and operating system can also affect the speed so do your homework.

Anandtech have in-depth coverage of SSD’s including an SSD Bench with Tom’s providing a more general SSD Buyer’s Guide. Drives come and go quickly so keep an eye on review dates and exact model numbers as manufacturers have models with similar names with difference specifications.

My choice – lightning giant

I settled on the Crucial RealSSD C300 (CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1) because of it’s blazingly fast 256GB configuration and my storage requirements were still around 150GB.

This combination doesn’t come cheap at $699 USD. My links to the Crucial web site include my affiliate code ever optimistic I’ll get a small commission on a drive or two. (I dream that one day my blog will cover it’s own hosting charges)

Some other popular alternatives

• Intel’s X-25M G2 is well regarded and can be had for around $430 for 160GB and $210 for 80GB
• Intel’s X-25V (for value) can be had for around $120 for 40GB

Installing my SSD & Mac OS X (without a DVD drive)

The newer Unibody MacBook Pro’s hard-drives are designed to be user-replaceable and are covered in the manual.

My non-Unibody is not however those nice chaps over at iFixit have put together a hard drive replacement guide for 15” that is close enough but I have one complication. My DVD drive died which raised the question (and subsequent section)

How do I install Snow Leopard without a DVD drive?

Remote Install

Remote Install let’s you put the a DVD into a machine with a drive, run Utilities > Remote Install and follow a few steps which include holding down the alt key on the machine that doesn’t have a drive.

Unfortunately the machine wanting to boot has to be a Mac mini or a MacBook Air from 2009 or later – i.e. something Apple shipped without a DVD drive.

NetBoot

Mac’s can boot from network images however there are also obstacles here:

1. Apple’s official Netboot server is part of Mac OS X Server and that costs $499
2. The only unofficial server-less guide I could find is out of date  (nicl & NetInfo were deprecated in Leopard)

You will also need to create an image of the Mac OS X DVD to be able to install from.

USB image

Your USB device will require over 6.2GB to fit the image of Snow Leopard and need to be partitioned with GUID Partition Table which will wipe it. My 4GB memory stick was too small and I didn’t want to wipe my 1TB external drive so ended up using my 8GB Compact Flash card.

To get the Snow Leopard DVD copied to it:

1. Use a Mac that has a DVD drive and insert both the install DVD and USB storage device
2. Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities folder
3. Select the USB storage device from the list of devices and then choose the Partition tab
4. Choose 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme drop-down
5. Press Options… choose GUID Partition Table then OK
6. Press Apply to confirm you are happy to wipe away all the data on the device
7. Select the install DVD from the list of devices and then choose the Restore tab
8. Drag the install DVD from the list of devices into the Source text box
9. Drag the USB storage device from the list of devices into the Destination text box
10. Press the Restore and wait a while

When finished eject the USB device and insert it into your DVD-less Mac. Turn it on holding down alt until a boot selection screen shows and use the arrow keys and return to launch the installer from your USB device.

It may take a while for the installer screen to appear but be patient.

Press Options… from the installer to turn all off all the features you don’t need such as additional languages, printer drivers etc.

Performance over time & TRIM

A simplified primer

SSDs are fast but the flash technology suffers some limitations most importantly they can’t overwrite data without erasing it first.

In order to avoid this performance hit, and to preserve the life of the drive itself as blocks can be erased a fine number of times, SSD drives use fresh blocks for as long as they are available. Once they run out every write has to take the hit of an erase and performance can drop to traditional hard-drive speeds (or worse).

The problem arises sooner than you think because file-systems when deleting a file do not actually cause an erase but rather just de-allocate the block knowing it will get overwritten when it’s next needed so these fresh blocks decrease over time even if you drive never gets full. (Which is how file-recovery tools are able to undelete files)

This doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that when erasing a file in an operating system the file system just removes the block from it’s own list to be reused later and therefore the drive itself has no knowledge that the block can be erased until it runs out and starts honoring overwrites.

The solution

Manufacturers initially solved this problem by writing tools (for Windows) that examined the file-system structures to find out which blocks are unused so they can send ‘erase block’ commands down to the SSD drive and get your performance back – at least until you run out of blocks again.

This wasn’t a great solution so they agreed on a standard called ‘TRIM’ that lets file-systems tell the drive when blocks are no longer and can be erased in background on-demand. Support was built into Windows 7 and Linux 2.6.28 making a lot of SSD owners very happy.

Mac OS X & TRIM

Mac OS X doesn’t yet support the TRIM command although one Apple engineer confirmed they are looking at it back in October. They’re in no hurry as the SSD drives Apple ship don’t support TRIM yet.

In the mean time you might want to minimize unnecessary writes:

1. Don’t use Finder’s Secure Empty Trash or the srm command line tool – the overwriting they did on magnetic drives doesn’t overwrite on SSD but steals up to 35x the blocks of the original!
2. Keep large churning files on external drives (e.g. video processing)
3. Don’t let your laptop run out of power as it copies the RAM to disk each time (2-8GB)
4. Prevent unnecessary disk operations such as the ‘last accessed’ attribute on files (see below)
5. Don’t keep running disk benchmarks that cause lots of writes!

Turn off last-access-time

These access times are pretty useless and indeed the iPhone also has them switched off. Create a file named noatime.plist in your /Library/LaunchDaemons path with the following contents:

<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>noatime</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>mount</string>
      <string>-vuwo</string>
      <string>noatime</string>
      <string>/</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

Thanks go to Ricardo Gameiro for that tip although his other Mac SSD tweaks of creating a RAM disk is questionable given the way Mac OS X manages memory and disabling the RAM copy-to-disk entirely and therefore losing data is more risky to me than running out of blocks early.

Do not

• Turn off the sudden motion sensor – SSDs ignore the park head command anyway
• Turn off HFS+ journaling – some users report odd issues and corruption

Last resort

If you do get into the situation where your write performance is suffering badly and you are prepared to spend a little time to get it back you can do the following:

1. Ensure you have a full Time Machine backup
2. Boot from a Linux Live CD containing a recent build of hdparm
3. Use hdparm to perform an ATA Secure Erase
4. Boot from your Mac OS X DVD/USB stick
5. Choose the Utilities > Restore System From Backup menu option
6. Point it at your Time Machine backup

You should also be able to do this with other full-system backup tools like SuperDuper but you’ll have to figure out the steps for yourself ;-)

Performance

I wish I had some better benchmarking tools but Xbench is all I have, sorry! It’s worth bearing in mind that the non-unibody MacBook Pro I have (MacBookPro3,1) is limited to 1.5GB/sec on the SATA bus (despite having an Intel ICH-8M SATA controller)

Xbench HD Test

My original performance figures with the original as-shipped 0001 firmware and Crucial’s updated 0002 firmware:

Thoughts

SSD is fast but given the hype I was expecting everything to be instant and it wasn’t quite there. Applications do normally launched within a single dock bounce and everything feels a lot snappier but there wasn’t the massive WOW! I was expecting – at least not yet.

There are also a few other advantages often overlooked, especially on a laptop:

• lower power consumption
• less weight, noise & heat
• greater shock, dust and magnetic resistance

Here’s a table that pulls the specs compared to the 7200RPM Travestar that was previously my main drive.

Time will tell how well the machine now deals with large Aperture libraries of RAW images and Visual Studio compilations from inside Parallels and I’ll be sure to report them here.

[)amien

What’s in your laptop bag?

January 4th 2008 • Apple, Hardware (brenthaven, laptop, radtech, Travel) • 1,307 views • 5 responses

Since my new laptop arrived I’ve been fine tuning my accessories in search of the developer-on-the-move setup. Here is my current contents complete with shameless Amazon Affiliate product links where applicable ;-)

Brenthaven Pro BackPack

My parents bought me the Brenthaven Pro 15-17 Backpack for Christmas. It has a great number of sections and compartments yet can still be thinly packed with the padding contributing to a comfortable wear. The only negatives are that the finish seems a little rough in places and that the rigid laptop protection area seems to be designed to hold a laptop almost twice as thick as a MacBook Pro despite claims of being ‘Designed for a 15.4″ MacBook and 17″ MacBook Pro’.

Of course the dream laptop bag would have an external USB port that would power and charge various devices within ;-)

RadTech sleeve & protector

I’ve owned RadTech sleeves for all three of my Apple laptop’s to date and they’ve all been excellent. Snug fitting, soft but hard-wearing and well-made they keep the machines clean and scratch-free. Now available in a multitude of colours but call me a traditionalist I’ve stuck with aluminium-grey. I also recommend grabbing a screen protector that sits between the keyboard and screen that doubles up as a cleaning cloth.

OCZ Rally 2 4GB USB stick

Another gift I recieved is the ever-useful USB memory stick for those odd file transfer tasks. The OCZ 4GB Rally 2 USB 2.0 Flash Drive can double up as a Vista ReadyBoost cache (providing you are booted natively, neither Parallels or VMware Fusion emulate it fast enough) and is housed in a small black metal enclosure the size of my little finger. Minor downsides are the easily-lost cap and the green led that casts an eerie glow over the geek at the keyboard.

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 600

I’ve been using mice with laptops less over the years as my comfort with trackpads has grown and i have found myself without desk space for a mouse. The Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laster Mouse 600 works quite well however and the battery seems to last for ages. It is quite light and possibly a bit too small to be comfortable and if I was to replace it I’d go with something Bluetooth to avoid the dongle (which clips into the mouse when not in use).

iPod Nano

I purchased a iPod Nano 8GB 3G late last year after my 60GB iPod died. The device is incredibly small with a good battery life and fantastic display. Not convinced that the screen or control is suited for video or games but it makes a great little music player – I’m just hoping the flash models have a longer lifespan.

Philips Earbuds

These Philips HN060/37 ‘Noise-Canceling’ Earbuds are pretty good considering the price, size and battery life. Whilst they don’t cancel noise out the combination of the in-ear mechanism, volume booster and the active circuity does help supress noise levels somewhat and I have found them particularly useful on flights. Some people find the high-pitched white noise the circuitry generates annoying and others find in-ear plugs irritating however. Personally the only problem I have with them is that the rubber pieces tend to come off and get lost quite easily but you can buy generic replacement packs from many airport/music stores.

My Book Pro 500GB External Drive

Leopard’s Time Machine combined with a Western Digital My Book Studio 500GB External Hard Drive provides me with a simple backup strategy that is lightning fast via FireWire 800 (800 Mbps) and still speedy over USB 2 (480 Mbps).

The Studio drive I linked to also provides eSATA support (couldn’t find mine on Amazon). It isn’t always in my backpack but does make a regular appearance.

Cables etc.

The bane of every techie’s life. Currently includes 1m USB extender, a USB to mini-USB cable that connects my TyTN, PSP, BlackBerry and Canon EOS 400D to my MacBook Pro and the Apple DVI to VGA adaptor for presentations. The Apple-supplied remote also sits in there for exactly that purpose.

Stationary

I like to keep a Moleskine pocket notepad tucked away, ruled by preference until they make a graph-paper version. This is normally coupled with a Pilot G2 at the moment which is comfy and smooth but takes too long to dry and is still too thick in the 0.38mm ’05′ version. Without sounding like a pen obsessive I’m going to try a Uni-Ball Signo Bit 0.18 next! There is also a nondescript mechanical pencil and large eraser.

Reading

Yes, there is still room in this TARDIS of a laptop bag for reading material. At the moment it is alternating between Designing Type, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager and The Art of Intrusion all of which were Christmas gifts :)

That’s it! would love to find out what other people keep in their laptop bags and hear suggestions on some of my weak spots. I wish I could fit a full-size tactile keyboard in it but I guess I’ll live!

[)amien

One week with a MacBook Pro 17″

December 19th 2007 • Apple, Hardware (Apple, MacBook-Pro, vista) • 1,492 views • 5 responses

It has been one week since I picked up my new MacBook Pro 17″ to replace my aging first-generation 15″ model.

My initial concern was that the size and weight would be unwieldy after 4 years of lugging around a 15″ MacBook Pro and a prior to that a Titanium PowerBook G4. The actual problem was that my trusty Samsonite Trunk & Co. backpack could not accommodate it and that I’d have to hope Santa would deliver something a little bigger. Being properly kitted up might reveal if the dimensions and weight are uncomfortable so expect an update once I’ve travelled with the beast.

The screen is fantastic, a little brighter, and provides me with a desktop-like experience in terms of real estate thanks to the combination of the increased size and the high-definition 1920×1200 option. I had examined the glossy finish in-store and found having my face and the rest of the store glaring back at me far too distracting for real work (it might be nice for watching DVD’s in the dark I guess) and so went with the matte finish. Surprisingly it is a little more reflective than the older MBP but not overly so and it does make removing unwelcome fingerprints easier.

One problem I had with m 15″ was that heavy use of Visual Studio within Parallels wasn’t always cutting it on performance. Compilation was faster than the cheap HP/Compaq desktop I’d been using but still wasn’t snappy enough to keep my attention tightly focused ;-)

I went with top options – a 2.6GHz processor coupled with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM 200GB drive – to ensure maximum performance. Mac OS X and native Vista did not disappoint and felt like a speedy desktop despite Vista being 32-bit and limited to 3GB of RAM until Apple ship a 64-bit ready Boot Camp drivers and tools.

My .NET development typically takes place inside a virtual machine – previously Parallels but now evaluating VMware Fusion with its enticing dual-core and 64-bit guest OS support. Both Parallels and Fusion had similar almost-native performance in the disk and processor department on my 15″ according to Vista’s performance index and I’ve yet to rerun those (stay tuned). Whichever gets Aero/DirectX 9Ex shader support first will be my home for a while.

Battery life was a big surprise offering over 3 hours and I certainly feel less conscious of where the next power feed is coming from although that is partly due to the poor battery on my old machine being rather tired and worn.

One big disappointment is the keyboard. Firstly it is the same size as the 15″ model which leaves the extra space to the speaker grille. Whilst the speakers do sound far superior – good enough to actually listen to music on – I couldn’t help but feel a wider enter key, a second ctrl and a little f-key spacing could have gone a long way. What is more concerning is that many keys do not register if hit off-centre even by a slight amount :(

There are still some things to try:

• Games under native Vista taking advantage of the Nvidia 8600M GT chip
• Time Machining my MyBook Pro external drive over FireWire 800 (800 Mb/s) instead of USB2 (400 Mb/s)
• Burning DVD performance
• Removing DVD drive (UJ-85J FBZ8) region protection (RPC) to play my DVD collection

[)amien

Goodbye BlogRush

November 22nd 2007 • Hardware, Internet (blogrush) • 1,204 views • 5 responses

I’ve now given up on BlogRush and removed the widget.

My dashboard shows that in the last 30 days I have directly earned 66,691 credits (made that number of impressions) and have been awarded 11,502 bonus credits and 3,473 referrer credits.

In return BlogRush have imprinted my last 12 blog posts (actually 11, one repeated, see below) and have sent a whole 15 visitors my way… that’s 1 visitor per 4,400 impressions which is mediocre by any measure. I get more hits than that in a month from leaving a couple of off-the-cuff comments on blog posts I’ve read elsewhere.

Apart from the mediocre conversions, some of the other problems include:

Uncontrolled spending of credits

BlogRush highly favours publicising the most recent articles regardless of hotness.

In my case it keeps putting out the More Silk Icons post despite only having 3 visitors for the 12,832 impressions whilst the older article on object initializers hasn’t got any new impressions despite getting 1 visitor for just 301 impressions.

If you have a glut of credits from a successful peak and you would rather hold on to your credits for the next post…well, tough, you can’t.

This forces you to change your posting schedule to meet your BlogRush credit balance.

Random capitalisation of post titles

It seems that BlogRush randomly changes the case of titles. Some examples include:

• Calculating CRC-64 in C# and .NET > Calculating Crc-64 In C# And .net
• AnkhSVN (Visual Studio Subversion integration) on Vista > AnkhSVN (visual Studio Subversion Integration) On Vista
• Droid font family courtesy of Google & Ascender > Droid Font Family Courtesy Of Google & Ascender
• Show Package Contents in Mac OS X > Show Package Contents In Mac Os X
• SQL Server replication blocking on clean-up job > Sql Server Replication Blocking On Cleanup Job
• Dissecting a C# Application – Inside SharpDevelop > Dissecting A C# Application – Inside Sharpdevelop

There seems to be no pattern behind it at all.

Duplication and random ignorance of content

My incredibly popular Droid Sans Mono great coding font post (42,000 hits in a week) doesn’t turn up on my BlogRush list at all.

Conversely my SQL Server replication article is treated as two different articles as I revised the title/URL.

Poor matching of content

Whilst they have introduced more specific categories my blog continued to show very unrelated posts – the whole simple categorisation system just doesn’t work especially when half the people haven’t revised from the more generic categories not have had any reminder or deadline to do so.

Something that worked off a posts tags would have been much better.

Filling the space

For now Google’s AdSense is taking the place rendering text adverts although for the default landing page it has no content for me. This apparently occurs if you are:

• Not indexed (definitely am, check out Google’s searches)
• Serving certain unspecified bad-words (every individual article gets adverts so not that)
• Nothing in your geographical region (see above)

I can only imagine the combination of words across certain posts when presented on the same page is hitting some magical figure. I hope talking about AdSense doesn’t mess it up further!

I doubt this widget will last very long – last time it was on for 3 months and earned me a whopping $9.

Ideally the site would move somewhere that can take being hit by the front page of DaringFireball again – that’s twice the sudden influx of users has knocked the site off. The first time my home DSL couldn’t take the strain, this time UHHosting kindly switched my site offoff for a couple of hours because I was “using too much CPU” – I have only WordPress, MySQL and a bunch of plug-in’s installed of which I have temporarily sacrificed FireStats, StatsPress and Gravatar2 at the sysop alter in order to keep my home online.

I have been toying with either renting a dedicated 1U server or co-locating one I buy. The latter was more tempting until I discovered that you only get 0.5 amps which is 120W for a whole server which means mirrored disks and a Core 2 chip are out…

[)amien

In search of the perfect keyboard

September 11th 2007 • Apple, Hardware (apple-keyboard, das-keyboard-ii, ibm-model-m, keyboards, matias-pro) • 1,660 views • 3 responses

I started programming at 12 and have been fortunate to carve out a successful career in something I love to do. People find it strange when I talk with passion about IDEs, fonts, colour schemes, mice and keyboards.

To me it seems perfectly natural when you consider a writer has strong preference and passion for pens and notebooks and photographers spend a small fortune on specific lenses and cameras to get the shot they want.

For years I was happy with my Apple Pro keyboard and then one day found myself messing around with my Amiga A600 and realised my typing was faster and more accurate on the Amiga than on the PC.

Some prefer “ergonomic” split-keyboards, others are impressed by back lighting, LCD screens or even an OLED display in every key. Most reviews skip over the most important aspect – what it is like to type on.

IBM Model M

I have fond memories of typing away on the IBM XT, AT and 5150 terminals and I found myself at eBay eyeing up an original unused IBM Model M keyboard similar to the ones those machines used.

Whilst the keyboard uses a membrane each key has its own spring that buckles as the key is pressed. This gives a satisfying tactile click that saw typing speed further accelerate than on the Amiga. Each key comprises of two plastic parts, the main body and the outer shell or key-cap. This means you can easily re-arrange the keys or put on specialist caps.

The Model M is a joy to type on but isn’t without fault. I can live without the Windows keys but the keyboard sports a huge surround taking up masses of desk space, is incredibly heavy and sounds like a machine gun when you get going with it.

Matias Tactile Pro

Apple produced a legendary keyboard too, the Apple Extended Keyboard but this has some immediate drawbacks in that it uses the Apple Desktop Bus, so would need an adapter, and is also tricky to get hold of.

I settled on the Matias Tactile Pro which uses the same Alps switches for each key but comes in a more friendly USB version. Designed for the Mac it has some extra keys and helpfully each key shows the various extra symbols available with the Alt key.

The Tactile Pro is great to type on however it is even louder than the IBM Model M and only available in the US key-map which means it is a couple of keys short. The enclosure mimics that of the Apple Pro keyboard but uses an inferior plastic that feels cheap and does nothing to dampen the volume but does helpfully feature a two port passive USB hub.

Note: The Matias Tactile Pro is an OEM version of the Strong Man SMK-Power989X. Matias now have the Tactile Pro 2.

Das Keyboard II

I’d heard some good things about the Das Keyboard II which unlike it’s predecessor is also mechanical but uses individual switches from one of the original keyboard manufacturers, Cherry.

The Das II is USB and is a little quieter than the other two keyboards but is still loud enough to annoy nearby co-workers and yet nicer to type on than the other two. One of the selling points of the Das II is that each key is totally blank resulting in one black keyboard but I could take or leave it.

Where the Das does fall down is the large echo-inducing enclosure and the cheap-feeling plastic used for both the keys and the surround.

Note: The Das Keyboard is effectively a custom OEM version of the Cherry G80 series.

Apple ultra-thin wired

I only picked up this keyboard a few days ago so my experience with it is not as extensive as the others which all got a fair work-in. Impressions so far are very good despite it being a scissor-switch like most laptops and not mechanical like the others.

The surround is an absolute minimum which is fantastic and it looks great. Noise levels are sufficiently quiet and the feeling very enjoyable despite the low-profile and gaps between the keys. The addition of a built-in USB hub is useful but MacBook Pro style light-sensitive back lighting would have been great.

Where next?

I’m sticking with the Apple at home for at least a couple of weeks and will continue to use the Das at work for now. The Model M and the Matias are currently gathering dust in the cupboard.

I have already modified my Das II by removing it from the enclosure and placing it on a soft sponge material. It is immediately much quieter with less echo and a soft wrist rest which solves some of the issues. Replacing the keys with a softer rubberised plastic would be great but injection moulding is rather expensive.

Check out the GeekHack keyboard forum for like minded chat.

[)amien