Episode 041 - SSD, Drobo and Hypermac
It's January 20th 2010, I'm Matt Hillyer and you are listening to The Stealth Mac Podcast
Episode 41 - Matt and the great Hard Disk Adventure
Welcome to the first audio show of 2010! I'm excited it's a new year and with the new year gives me the inspiration to continue to improve this show - if there's anything that you would like for me to talk about or if you have a submission feel free to email me at
Also if you have a moment could you please hop on over to iTunes and give us a rating. The more ratings we have, the more likely the podcast will show up as a suggestion to new listeners, so please take a moment and give us a rating - I would appreciate that greatly!
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=290517037
Well I've been pretty quiet since Christmas and there are a few reasons for that. First I've been pretty busy with family, school and work. The second reason is that I've been having a few issues with hard drives on my mac book pro.
Now these issues are nothing to do with the Mac itself, it is fine and honestly if I were to stop messing with it and trying to modify things it would work perfectly fine.
Let me explain a little-
I've been toying with the idea of getting a Solid State drive - the problem is that they are too small for all my data - my user folder is right around 300GB by itself!! The solution that I came up with was inspired by Don McAllister from http://www.screencastsonline.com - he recently did a show where he used a product called an Optibay in combination with an SSD to get the best of both worlds, the speed of an SSD for apps and OS and the storage of data with a spinning hard disk.
I've reviewed optibay in previous episode but really it's a mounting bracket that fits in the optical drive bay of your macbook pro and allows you to mount a second hard disk so that your mac can carry and use 2 hard drives.
the optibay goes for around $99 US and even comes with a USB external case for your optical drive to go in once it's pulled out of the macbook pro.
The Optbay is made by MCE and the link will be in the shownotes - http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
So I ordered a 256GB Crucial Solid State Drive and a 750GB 5400 RPM Western Digital Hard Drive from Otherworld computing. (http://www.macsales.com/) - this would give me a total of 1TB of storage on my mac.
My plan was OS and apps on the SSD and the user folder would be mapped to the 750GB Hard disk.
My first intent was to place the 750 drive in the optibay and the SSD in the actual hard drive bay of the Macbook pro but i soon found out the 750 drive a little thicker than standard 2.5" drives. I've placed a pic in the show notes so you can see the difference.
I had to settle with the SSD in the optibay and the 750 in the hard drive bay - and that worked just fine.
In case you were wondering - yes, the unibody mac's will take the slightly thicker 2.5" drives just fine.
Now the next bit was where things turned south - I tried to load OSX on the ssd and it continued to fail - I pulled it out and placed it in an external USB enclosure and was able to load it that way - but it took forever. And after it was loaded it still was acting buggy. After several tests I determined that the SSD was faulty and contacted OWC for a replacement.
Now I have to give Other World Computing some props here - they provided me an RMA with no resistance - I figured they'd make me do a bunch of testing or give me the run around. Nope - within a few minutes of filling out the form on the website I had my RMA paperwork and had the drive boxed up and ready to ship back to OWC. Within 24 hours of them receiving the return I had a new SSD in my hot little hands.
Now I ran into some other issues with my second SSD - it was also acting a little odd - but I think I've got that settled and as of today I am running OS on my SSD and my user folder on my 750gb.
I'll update you in a few weeks as to how this solution is working out since I haven't had much luck with the SSD drives so far.
I'll also be talking about the speed comparisons of the various drives in a later show.
Another toy that I've recently gotten was a Drobo S. For those of you who don't know what a Drobo is - it's an external hard drive system made by http://www.datarobotics.com
This is a case with 5 bays and they use a proprietary RAID system that allows you to increase drive size as you progress to ever increase the total storage size of the device.
I really recommend you check out the website for a better description. I opted to get the Drobo S with 1.5 TB drives - of course, within 24 hours one of the drives failed and I had to work with Western Digital to replace the drive - I've had a few hard drives issues the last few weeks. I attribute that to the dry air causing static electricity everywhere in my house and the extreme cold all these devices have been shipping in. The Drobo is running fine now with 5 working drives and I have a total storage capacity of about 4TB. There is some capacity loss due to the raid technology being used to protect against hard disk failure.
I was using FW800 to connect to the drobo but a coworker gave me an express 34 eSATA card and I've been playing with that for the last few days. Overall I am very impressed with my drobo unit and the eSATA connection makes it a very fast device.
I've posted some pics of the Drobo and my desk setup in the show notes:
The last new toy I'd like to tell you about is the hypermac external battery.
This is an external battery for my MacBook Pro and can be found at
I chose the 100watt hour battery and it measures 7.48" x 4.92" by 0.83" and weighs 1.6 pounds. From the website it should provide up to 13.3 hours of battery life.
I chose this device because I wanted my Macbook pro to last an entire session at macworld.
In my testing I came across a few bumps - first the macbook pro battery must be fully charged - if you don't have a full charge then the computer will continually try to charge the battery off the hypermac and this causes a very short run time on the hypermac.
also - the macbook pro has to be using the lower powered gpu, and you really can't push the computer too much. Any time the fans kick on or the computer starts to draw a lot of power - more than the hypermac can provide the internal battery will kick in and then the hypermac will forever try to charge the batter causing issues.
With minimal cpu usage in my tests I was able to squeeze about 7 hours out of the hypermac and an additional 2 from my internal battery giving me a total of 9 hours of runtime wirelessly.
The battery uses the magsafe adapter to power your computer so the one problem here is that it's easy to pop off - I wish there was some way to secure this so it wasn't so easily unplugged.
I think overall the power issues I had with the Hypermac were more of my own fault then the devices. When I ordered the battery I was originally going to get the 60 watt hour, but a warning popped up that it wasn't recommended to be used with the MacBook Pro line. So I went with the next step up - the 100. In hindsight I should had gone with a bigger, beefier battery.
The nice thing is that the battery doesn't give off any heat while in use and is rather small - so it fits in my backpack slot perfectly and there is a place for me to run my charging cord out to the mac.
Well that will do it for show 41 - I hope you enjoyed my reviews and if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me at
Please join us next week as we review the upcoming Apple Event on Jan 27th and discuss all the new announcements.
See you then - I'm Matt Hillyer and thanks for listening to The Stealth Mac Podcast.
Episode 41 - Matt and the great Hard Disk Adventure
Welcome to the first audio show of 2010! I'm excited it's a new year and with the new year gives me the inspiration to continue to improve this show - if there's anything that you would like for me to talk about or if you have a submission feel free to email me at
Also if you have a moment could you please hop on over to iTunes and give us a rating. The more ratings we have, the more likely the podcast will show up as a suggestion to new listeners, so please take a moment and give us a rating - I would appreciate that greatly!
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=290517037
Well I've been pretty quiet since Christmas and there are a few reasons for that. First I've been pretty busy with family, school and work. The second reason is that I've been having a few issues with hard drives on my mac book pro.
Now these issues are nothing to do with the Mac itself, it is fine and honestly if I were to stop messing with it and trying to modify things it would work perfectly fine.
Let me explain a little-
I've been toying with the idea of getting a Solid State drive - the problem is that they are too small for all my data - my user folder is right around 300GB by itself!! The solution that I came up with was inspired by Don McAllister from http://www.screencastsonline.com - he recently did a show where he used a product called an Optibay in combination with an SSD to get the best of both worlds, the speed of an SSD for apps and OS and the storage of data with a spinning hard disk.
I've reviewed optibay in previous episode but really it's a mounting bracket that fits in the optical drive bay of your macbook pro and allows you to mount a second hard disk so that your mac can carry and use 2 hard drives.
the optibay goes for around $99 US and even comes with a USB external case for your optical drive to go in once it's pulled out of the macbook pro.
The Optbay is made by MCE and the link will be in the shownotes - http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
So I ordered a 256GB Crucial Solid State Drive and a 750GB 5400 RPM Western Digital Hard Drive from Otherworld computing. (http://www.macsales.com/) - this would give me a total of 1TB of storage on my mac.
My plan was OS and apps on the SSD and the user folder would be mapped to the 750GB Hard disk.
My first intent was to place the 750 drive in the optibay and the SSD in the actual hard drive bay of the Macbook pro but i soon found out the 750 drive a little thicker than standard 2.5" drives. I've placed a pic in the show notes so you can see the difference.
I had to settle with the SSD in the optibay and the 750 in the hard drive bay - and that worked just fine.
In case you were wondering - yes, the unibody mac's will take the slightly thicker 2.5" drives just fine.
Now the next bit was where things turned south - I tried to load OSX on the ssd and it continued to fail - I pulled it out and placed it in an external USB enclosure and was able to load it that way - but it took forever. And after it was loaded it still was acting buggy. After several tests I determined that the SSD was faulty and contacted OWC for a replacement.
Now I have to give Other World Computing some props here - they provided me an RMA with no resistance - I figured they'd make me do a bunch of testing or give me the run around. Nope - within a few minutes of filling out the form on the website I had my RMA paperwork and had the drive boxed up and ready to ship back to OWC. Within 24 hours of them receiving the return I had a new SSD in my hot little hands.
Now I ran into some other issues with my second SSD - it was also acting a little odd - but I think I've got that settled and as of today I am running OS on my SSD and my user folder on my 750gb.
I'll update you in a few weeks as to how this solution is working out since I haven't had much luck with the SSD drives so far.
I'll also be talking about the speed comparisons of the various drives in a later show.
Another toy that I've recently gotten was a Drobo S. For those of you who don't know what a Drobo is - it's an external hard drive system made by http://www.datarobotics.com
This is a case with 5 bays and they use a proprietary RAID system that allows you to increase drive size as you progress to ever increase the total storage size of the device.
I really recommend you check out the website for a better description. I opted to get the Drobo S with 1.5 TB drives - of course, within 24 hours one of the drives failed and I had to work with Western Digital to replace the drive - I've had a few hard drives issues the last few weeks. I attribute that to the dry air causing static electricity everywhere in my house and the extreme cold all these devices have been shipping in. The Drobo is running fine now with 5 working drives and I have a total storage capacity of about 4TB. There is some capacity loss due to the raid technology being used to protect against hard disk failure.
I was using FW800 to connect to the drobo but a coworker gave me an express 34 eSATA card and I've been playing with that for the last few days. Overall I am very impressed with my drobo unit and the eSATA connection makes it a very fast device.
I've posted some pics of the Drobo and my desk setup in the show notes:
The last new toy I'd like to tell you about is the hypermac external battery.
This is an external battery for my MacBook Pro and can be found at
I chose the 100watt hour battery and it measures 7.48" x 4.92" by 0.83" and weighs 1.6 pounds. From the website it should provide up to 13.3 hours of battery life.
I chose this device because I wanted my Macbook pro to last an entire session at macworld.
In my testing I came across a few bumps - first the macbook pro battery must be fully charged - if you don't have a full charge then the computer will continually try to charge the battery off the hypermac and this causes a very short run time on the hypermac.
also - the macbook pro has to be using the lower powered gpu, and you really can't push the computer too much. Any time the fans kick on or the computer starts to draw a lot of power - more than the hypermac can provide the internal battery will kick in and then the hypermac will forever try to charge the batter causing issues.
With minimal cpu usage in my tests I was able to squeeze about 7 hours out of the hypermac and an additional 2 from my internal battery giving me a total of 9 hours of runtime wirelessly.
The battery uses the magsafe adapter to power your computer so the one problem here is that it's easy to pop off - I wish there was some way to secure this so it wasn't so easily unplugged.
I think overall the power issues I had with the Hypermac were more of my own fault then the devices. When I ordered the battery I was originally going to get the 60 watt hour, but a warning popped up that it wasn't recommended to be used with the MacBook Pro line. So I went with the next step up - the 100. In hindsight I should had gone with a bigger, beefier battery.
The nice thing is that the battery doesn't give off any heat while in use and is rather small - so it fits in my backpack slot perfectly and there is a place for me to run my charging cord out to the mac.
Well that will do it for show 41 - I hope you enjoyed my reviews and if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me at
Please join us next week as we review the upcoming Apple Event on Jan 27th and discuss all the new announcements.
See you then - I'm Matt Hillyer and thanks for listening to The Stealth Mac Podcast.