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.
Does Hitachi+SimpleTech = EMC+Iomega?
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Terabyte home on 24. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) just bought Fabrik (SimpleTech and G-Technology). So is Hitachi’s combination with SimpleTech a response or challenge to EMC’s acquisition of Iomega? In a word, no.
Western Digital + Fujitsu = More Competition for Seagate and Hitachi
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 02. Oct, 2008 | View Comments
Western Digital may purchase Fujitsu’s hard disk drive development and manufacturing assets, getting closer to market-leader, Seagate, with greater manufacturing capacity and access to the laptop OEM market
Xen 3.3 Update Brings Paravirtualized SCSI
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 28. Aug, 2008 | View Comments
One of the new features in Xen 3.3, released this week, caught my eye: Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), which allows a guest OS to directly interact with a SCSI (or Fibre Channel) HBA. This should allow more specialized applications to be virtualized in Xen environments that use SCSI or FC storage without requiring the addition of [...]
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 [...]
Upgraded! 320 GB in a MacBook Pro!
Posted by Stephen in Apple, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 25. Jun, 2008 | View Comments
I know I’m not the first to do this, but it does make me chuckle to have upgraded a brand new machine less than a week after buying it. That’s right, my brand new MacBook Pro now has 4 GB of RAM and a massive 320 GB of disk space. If you’re thinking of upgrading your [...]
Specialized Server/Enterprise Hard Drives
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 07. Aug, 2007 | View Comments
Continuing my overview of the specialized hard drive market, we move on to the world of enterprise hard disk drives. These are performance monsters, with nearly all falling above the 10,000 RPM line that defines “exotic” in the desktop space. They also have a wide variety of interfaces, including parallel and serial [...]
Specialized Hard Drives: Worth the Effort?
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home on 03. Aug, 2007 | View Comments
Lately, there has been a lot of buzz in the enterprise storage arena about whether so-called “enterprise drives” are really any better than plain-Jane hard drives in Enterprise applications. This came to a head with the controversial findings of Google and CMU, but it’s been simmering under the covers everywhere from TiVo communities to [...]
