So the Mac has joined my replacement work Dell – two new computers in two days! Here are my first thoughts on the hardware: The MacBook Pro is much sturdier than the average PC notebook, and even somewhat better than the high-end machines I’ve used (like my replacement Dell XPS M1330) The machine is hot […]
Windows Vista
Switch! or How the Mac (Finally) Won Me Over
It’s official, I am a switcher. A splitter. An ex-Windows user (at home, at least). Today I bought my first Mac since the SE that still haunts our basement storage room in its cute gray carrying bag. Come Friday, I will be an official Mac user! How did it come to this? It’s not really […]
Custom Icons Keep Removable Drives Straight
Update: I have created another page for custom drive icons in Mac OS X If you’re like most people, you have accumulated a large number of removable USB storage devices over the years, from flash-based thumb drives to external hard disks. I have seven of these things sitting on my desk or in by laptop […]
Specialized Desktop Hard Drives
I will begin my overview of the specialized hard drive market with the ubiquitous desktop disk drive. While just about any drive could be used in a desktop computer, the class is generally defined by what it lacks – compact size, power efficiency, exotic interfaces, special drive features, and high performance are all generally not […]
Hybrid Drives Are Here — But they’re Irrelevant to Enterprise Storage
It isn’t every day that a new hard disk technology is introduced, but Samsung recently did just that with the introduction of their SpinPoint MH80. This conventional looking SATA hard drive packs 256 MB of NAND flash memory alongside two conventional platters totaling 160 GB of traditional magnetic storage. Tellingly, it’s a 2.5” laptop drive […]