G5

How Should An External Hard Drive Be Attached?

May 15, 2010 by Stephen Leave a Comment

I bought a 3rd SATA drive, and have nowhere to put it in my PowerMac G5. I forgot there was only room for 2 inside! I do audio recording: Lots of Digital Performer, plus a bit of Pro Tools. I recently bought a new 1 TB Hitachi drive and don’t know how to house it.

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!

Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

April 4, 2017

I’ve got a lot to say about storage, as you might have noticed from reading my blog. So I finally sat down and wrote a book on enterprise storage. Now you can download the e-book for free, thanks to support from my friends at SolarWinds!

The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles

August 25, 2010

Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? Mechanical performance, RAM caching, I/O capacity, and the intelligence of the system all have a part to play. Today we examine the rule of spindles: Adding more disk spindles is generally more effective than using faster spindles.

Storage Changes in VMware vSphere 5.1

September 4, 2012

As I have done since version 3.5, I’m charting the storage changes in VMware’s latest release of vSphere, 5.1. Unlike version 5, which included many new technical storage features, 5.1 mainly tweaks existing features and adds these new elements to the mix.

The Rack Endgame: Open Compute Project

September 17, 2014

On reading my thoughts about the evolution of enterprise storage, many pointed out that this looks an awful lot like the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP). This is entirely intentional. But OCP is simply one expression of this new architecture, and perhaps not the best one for the enterprise.

We Live in the Future: Robotic Cat Litter Boxes!

May 8, 2010

This post is a bit of a break from my usual gadget-fest, but the object in question isn’t that far off: It requires electricity, costs more than average humans can justify, and simplifies a task we’ve all been doing fine up until now. That’s right: An overly-expensive electric cat litter box. Predictably, I love it.

Ten Terrible Apple Products

June 14, 2012

I’m often accused of being an Apple fanboy. While it’s true that I love my vast selection of fruity products from Cupertino, I’m not blind when the company makes mistakes. In fact, I think Apple’s mistakes are as enlightening as their successes: They reveal a company that is fallible, sometimes learning but often allowing the junk to rot far longer than other companies would.

My Visit to Bletchley Park

August 3, 2012

Bletchley Park is much more than a museum. For those interested in the history of computing, like me, or World War II buffs, it’s a must-see. The reconstructed Bombe and Colossus computer are truly breathtaking, and I find myself drawn to the stories of codebreaking that took place here. I highly recommend a visit!

On the Death of Innovation, or “These Kids These Days!”

May 21, 2012

An obnoxious meme has returned to the fore lately, claiming that innovation is dead. The hippies did it, or maybe it was the Internet, or even a decline of America. But nothing could be further from the truth, and statements like this make me question the perspective of the speaker.