The faster, cheaper, cooler-running WD My Book Studio

Stop reading now if disk drives bore you. You might be able to find some articles up here about storage disaster recovery, because if disks make your eyes glaze over, you’re likely to recover from a disaster. Knowing the basics about disks for your Mac is as important as knowing a cholesterol score. A slow score, or a low score for your drive is going to attack the heart of your business: your data.

That’s why I was glad to review the improved model of the Western Digital My Book Studio. I found it faster, running cooler and a better value than a drive I bought at the start of the year.

The price of external drives, which you plug into your Mac, has dropped dramatically since I last bought a drive. Just seven months ago I paid $140 for a Mercury Elite AL Pro 1.5TB drive with two kinds of interfaces, two FireWire 400, and one USB 2.0. The 3TB My Book — twice as much storage — costs $200 at Amazon.com for three kinds of interfaces, two Firewire (either can be used at 400 or 800) plus a USB port. (The wider range of interfaces to plug in, the better. Your more modern Macs are now shipping with fewer ports on them, and it’s good to have non-USB port choices on the back of a drive.)

One of the biggest upgrades to this My Book — I now run a two-year-old 1TB My Book for Time Machine backups — is the new case. It’s morphed from plastic to aluminum, so it stays cooler. Cool means quieter, and this drive is so cool it has no fan. No fan is one less moving part to break down, plus less electricity to purchase.

I ran speed tests against this newest My Book. A massive file transfer that took 6 minutes, 53 seconds on the older My Book completed in 5:37. That’s about 20 percent faster, time that can really add up in an era when big files of 10MB or more — think recorded Skype calls. or the size of your iPhoto Library — have become commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Five places to do a better disk upgrade than inside

Mac accessory supplier iFixIt is selling a solution to add two bigger drives inside the well-sealed-up Mac Mini. The concept means cracking the case on this half-shoebox sized computer and replacing the Superdrive with a faster and bigger disk. No more CD/DVD option after this.

Any plan to crack a Mini for this is crackers. The Mini runs without a fan and manages to keep itself cool enough to keep operating. But the back of that little miracle is warm-plus with just one drive running inside. With a Firewire 800 port on the back, putting another heater of a drive inside asks for trouble that Apple won’t fix.

Upgrading the memory inside is a different, better reason to use a putty knife to get that case open. Apparently once you get 2GB of memory inside, the Mini can recognize 256MB of it for better graphics performance.

But adding that memory happens one of two ways: You buy the $799 unit from Apple in the sealed and warranteed case, or you get inside to beef up the $599 model to 2GB. Just because you or your geeky pal can do something like update memory for you doesn’t mean you should. Saving $200 on the cheaper unit (well, about $175 after you buy the extra memory) could cost you later in warranty. The smaller the Mac, the more chance it will need Apple’s service if something goes awry. It’s close quarters inside there. Read the rest of this entry »

Retrospect is so aged and unresponsive, after using it for more than 11 years here, that I’m moving away from it for our backups. In 2008 the EMC rep at Macworld said a new version would be out by the fall of ’08. EMC missed that date, not a good sign for its commitment to Mac. Really now: OS X is just another Unix under the covers.

Time Machine gets the vote here for the newer systems (those running Leopard). Yes, it takes a little trick to get a Time Machine drive ready to boot up in case of a crash, but it’s worth it. Mac OSX Hints has the process here. Well worth the time.

As for Retrospect: Yes, as a business we’ve used it, but it takes tinkering. I’ve probably spent the equivalent of 10 hard drives in rewritable CDs and then DVDs staying backed up. It might be worthwhile to have several hundred versions of the InBox from your e-mail program, but I’ve only looked at a handful of these snapshots over a decade. SuperDuper is far superior to keep a current version of your drives backed up. At $29, it’s too cheap to overlook.

Once a week I schedule a Retro backup onto the DVD plastic. I’m not sure why, but there’s all those years of habit.

Offsite storage is good. I use CrashPlan on the newest iMac and BackJack for our Tiger systems. Each is about $45 a year for storage over the Internet to a remote server. The latter is great at telling you what it’s doing, right down to an e-mail verification. It works the way Mozy did here during 2008, until EMC (them again!) spoiled its Mac interface.

Just this morning I read of another method for offsite backup: Find a Mac buddy who you can have coffee with once a week and swap backup hard drives with them. Do a Carbon Copy Clone of your drive before you go have your grande latte. That way you’re at worst only 7 days behind on a backup in case of a fire. Be serious about the relative value of an offsite backup in the aftermath of a fire. A billboard near my office reminds me that more than 4 out of every 5 businesses — small or large — cannot resume operations after a disaster.

How does Apple make its profits? First off, we’re glad they’re making them. It keeps a vendor healthy and innovative. But since the Apple Store is the new mecca for Mac users, it’s a good place to spy where the profits are being produced. The latest MacBooks have a $200 example of extra profit: Disk drive upgrades.

A modest bump on Macbooks from 160 GB to 320 GB drives the price up by $200. Paying an extra $200 for a drive that costs under $100 certainly makes the installation sound like it should be expensive and difficult. But upgrading hard drives is easier than it’s ever been for a Mac in the Macbooks. Apple has put the disk drive access under an easy-to-snap-off cover.

Save the money and order a drive from a third party company like Other World Computing. Let the customers who don’t enjoy integrating to save money pay the extra price. As Alan Dang says in the Tom’s Hardware blog,

In general, these [included Macbook drives] are run-of-the-mill notebook drives, and we recommend upgrading to aftermarket drives. Time Machine makes it extremely straightforward to migrate your computer from one drive to another (provided that you have an external drive). One good choice is the Seagate Momentus 7200.4.

If you really must have Apple integrate a bigger drive, consider jumping up to the 2.4 GHz model of the Macbook Aluminum. It’s got 20 percent more horsepower, but the disk drive adds another 90GB of storage. Oh, and that’s an extra $400. You won’t be able to boost the power of the Macbook, but you can always add more storage.

MacBook Pro owners face an eventual failure from their SuperDrive CD/DVD reader-writers. The 2006 batch of MB Pros all shipped with a fouled run of optical drive hardware. User after user complained and found failures in the only device that would load their new applications like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s Office Applications. Read the long and sad tale of failures at the Macintouch Reader Report Forum. Even the new MacBook Pro owners are getting bitten.)

The included device gained some stability in later MB Pro units, so by 2008 you had a better than even chance of having a SuperDrive remain operative within the one-year warranty. But hundreds of thousands of MacBook Pro SuperDrives went out the door with a Mean Time Between Failure  (the old MTBF ranking for professional storage) of well under 20,000 hours. A weak figure at best, and unacceptible for small business or enterprise use.

Replacing these units can be simple, or not too costly. But not both. By simple, I mean the $310 replacement drive from the Apple Store, plus an $85 replacement fee. “It’s pretty much $400,” the Apple Genius Bar tech told me tonight. (Then there’s the tax, but at least there’s no shipping.) That’s a total cost of 40 percent of the price of a new MacBook, and about one-third the cost of the lowest MacBook Pro. But this solution is easy, so long as you can do without your MacBook for a week or more. (This is where having the Apple Pro uplift on AppleCare gets you to the front of the line, I’m told.) Read the rest of this entry »