Drobo: First Impressions
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 04. Sep, 2009 | View Comments
Although the Drobo “storage robot”, essentially a friendly home RAID enclosure, has long impressed me, it never fit my laptop-oriented lifestyle. But my home network has changed with the addition of a 2009 Mac Mini server, so it was time for me to pick up a Drobo of my own!
Don’t Be Jealous Of The New MacBook Pros!
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 16. Jun, 2009 | View Comments
Apple’s recently introduced mid-2009 MacBook Pros sure do look nice! I am definitely tempted to trade up my late-2007 model, leveraging the excellent resale value that Mac hardware commands. But two of Apple’s trick features for 2009 are already present on my old workhorse: An integrated SD card slot and up to 7 hours of [...]
Drobo For Pros But Not Me
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 09. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
DroboPro is here, and it’s quite a compelling offering. It’s generating buzz (DroboPro was the number one trend on Twitter for a while on Tuesday) but is it deserving? In a word, yes. But I’m still not going to buy one!
The Drobo for Pros
Just as in Apple’s Mac and MacBook lineup, the “Pro” name denotes [...]
New Mac Mini Is A Diamond In The Rough
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Everything, Terabyte home on 10. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
After a very, very long wait, Apple has finally updated their entry-level “bridge” Mac, the Mac Mini. It’s amazing that, after 19 months without an update, Apple’s new Mini looks exactly the same as the old Mini. But what’s under the hood matters, and Apple delivered a mixed bag there. The new Mini is an excellent home server, which is how mine will be used, but some poor choices limit its abilities out of the box.
The Future of Home Storage
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Computer history, Terabyte home on 12. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Consumers demand friendly, flexible solutions. They don’t want to fuss with their media, and they don’t want simple shared storage. They want integration with multiple devices and flexibility to access their content on any device.
Switch Day 58: Ten Pros and Cons of the MacBook Pro
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home on 11. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
I’ve now been a Mac user for two months. Since I switched primarily to get access to Apple’s excellent hardware, I thought I would issue an update on my observations about it at this point. I should note that I’m limiting this post to the hardware (maybe I’ll cover OS X some other time), and [...]
Yes, FireWire is Faster Than USB
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 30. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
This should not come as a shock to anyone, as it has been proven before, but let me take this moment to say that, yes, despite their rated speeds, 400-megabit FireWire S400 (aka IEEE 1394) is faster than 480-megabit USB 2.0.
While swapping out disk drives (first to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro [...]
How To Move OS X Time Machine Backups To A New Disk
Posted by Stephen in Apple on 26. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
Well, that happened pretty quickly! After upgrading the internal hard drive on my MacBook Pro to 320 GB, I moved the 120 GB disk Apple shipped with the machine to my Verbatim SmartDisk FireWire+USB enclosure to use as a Time Machine backup target. Despite applying some tricks to reduce the amount of data backed up [...]
Drobo 2: Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 08. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
Data Robotics today introduced the second generation of what I think of as a personal storage array, but although the Drobo 2 offers great enhancements, making it a top choice for those needing massive and protected storage on a single computer, it’s still not what I’m looking for in a home storage device.
Low-Power USB Ports Haunt My MacBook Pro
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Terabyte home on 04. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
