As I mentioned in my previous article, I decided to buy the 13″ Core i5 (base model) MacBook Pro. It meets my needs as a travel workstation, but how does it perform? I decided to benchmark it against my other Macs to see how it stands up.
performance
USB 3.0 For Mac Is Here!
My experience using USB 3.0 on a Mac has been wonderful. It’s so well-integrated you might not notice it except for the performance. At over 200 MB/s, it blows FireWire out of the water and is even faster than nearly any device you’re likely to throw at it. CalDigit sent me their Mac OS X-compatible USB 3.0 PCI Express card for evaluation, and I’m pleased as punch with the card.
The Three Requirements To Overcome Inertia
In Philosophiæ Naturalis, Sir Isaac Newton defined inertia. Although he was referring to physical objects, the power of inertia affects companies, markets, and relationships in the same manner. Humans are creatures of habit, and change is challenging. When faced with a choice of continuing along the same road or branching off in a new direction, most will choose familiarity.
Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
On the storage side, arrays can only use the information they have to deallocate: The data that’s stored on them. They don’t know what application is using it, what file system it is. But, somewhere along the line, someone had a big idea and said, “wait a second, what if we look for pages that are all zeros?” We’ll talk about pages a bit later, but for now, let’s talk about zeros. A zero is kind of a smoke signal coming up from over the hills that says, “there’s nothing valuable here.”
Commodity Hardware Always Wins
The history of technology moves in fits and starts, but one trend trumps all else: An inevitable shift from fine-tuned specialized gear to general-purpose commodity building blocks. We see it in both hardware and software, and at all levels of the industry, from chips and wafers to operating systems and networking devices. Take a step back and you’ll certainly agree: Commodity hardware always wins (eventually).
