humandoing software » hardware

Install Snow Leopard From SD Card

Daniel Wintschel — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 22:13:05 +0000

This came in immensely useful for me today, for reasons too long to discuss.

Seagate Momentus XT – Boot Times

Daniel Wintschel — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:15:15 +0000

I did a few more tests to try to record differences in boot times. I re-installed (well, re-imaged anyways) the Momentus XT while hooked up as an external drive. I re-installed it, and the subsequent boot times (as it “learned” what files to store on the SSD portion of the drive) looked something like this:

1st Boot: 1 min 33 sec
2nd Boot: 1 min 17 sec
3rd Boot: 29 sec
4th Boot: 33 sec

The boot times were calculated by me completely shutting down my MacBook Pro. Once I turned it on, I waited for the chime, and started the stopwatch on my iPhone. I stopped the stopwatch on the iPhone immediately after all icons were visible on the desktop, and the items in my menu bar had opened (DropBox, Rivet, Evernote).

Seagate Momentus XT – Hybrid HD

Daniel Wintschel — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:13:21 +0000

Two weeks ago, my wife and I returned from a vacation to Montreal. As fate would have it, the next morning (before I had a chance to make a clone, which I do on a nightly basis when I’m not on vacation), my hard drive up and died. System lockups. Half booting into OSX but not really. Brutal.

I’d been looking at the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drives for a while (with particular interest since I read the review from Anandtech), and now that I needed a new drive (and needed it faster than AppleCare was going to get it to me) – I headed on down to NCIX and picked one of those suckers up.

For those interested in such things, I picked up the 500GB model (ST95005620AS) for about $150.00. It came with firmware SD22 installed.

I could never be bothered to perform detailed benchmarking on stuff – that’s what reading Anandtech is for. But here are my two observations so far:

This drive is FAST
This drive is LOUD

Boot time is cut to about 1/3 of my previous, after a few boots to get the SSD portion of the drive warmed up. Launching apps (Firefox, Safari, Adium, Aperture, Mail, 1Password, etc.) is ridiculously fast. Often less than a single bounce for Safari.

For reference, it’s worth noting that these observations are now being made while I’m using a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel i7 / 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM) – when I first installed the drive it was in a 15″ MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo / 2.53GHz, 4GB RAM). I could say the same about the older MacBook Pro. Very fast.

As I also mentioned, it’s loud. It’s extremely obvious that there is a drive spun up in the machine, much louder than any previous drive I’ve had in any of my previous MacBook or MacBook Pro’s.

Overall reviews (generally speaking) for the drive are hugely mixed. I read reviews from Amazon, Newegg and NCIX. There are a lot of people happy with the drive, and a lot of people unhappy with the drive. Common complaints include corrupt files (not sure if some of these people had any clue as to what they were talking about, or might have simply got a bad drive, which happens sometimes. Deal with it.), but the largest complaint seems to be with drive spin-down. Several people note that their drive spins down on a regular basis (e.g. every 25 minutes), and then their machine will beachball as they wait for it to spin-up again. Seagate seems to have released a firmware update (SD23) that supposedly addresses this.

Several people have also complained that they can’t get the firmware update to work. I hadn’t noticed any spin-down problems, but just for kicks I thought I’d try to update the firmware. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a disk, rebooted, let it boot into whatever forsaken version of DOS they use, and within about 30 seconds I had new firmware installed without so much as a hiccup. So that’s my experience.

I haven’t decided for certain if I’ll keep the drive (although I’ll take a 15% hit from NCIX for a restocking fee), simply because of how loud it is. I might opt for the tried and true ‘normal’ Seagate Momentus until they have some of the kinks worked out, but I still have about 5 days to decide.

Router Showdown: Linksys WRT610N vs D-Link DIR-825 vs Apple Airport Extreme

Daniel Wintschel — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:31:20 +0000

This post has been sitting here as a Draft since September. Since I haven’t had the time to formulate my thoughts into family-friendly words, and since I can’t stand to see it sit here any longer, I’d like to summarize my findings ever so briefly.

Linksys WRT610N: Looks pretty. Admin interface is dated and aggravating. It had ongoing issues handing out IP addresses to my network attached printers, and after about 3 days, I wanted to smash it with a hammer (I returned it to Future Shop instead). Conclusion: FAIL.

D-Link DIR-825: Probably one of the most aggravating pieces of hardware I’ve ever had. Required constant reboots. The wireless range (especially of the 5GHz band) was so pitiful that it might as well not exist (or, optionally, you can cozy up to the router in the closet). That being said, even if you wanted to work right next to this thing in the closet – you’ll have to contend with the aggravating number of horrendously blue lights that could quite easily cause you to bleed out of your eyes. It was so aggravating, in fact, that I gave it away (I was too late to be able to return it). Conclusion: FAIL.

Apple Airport Extreme: This thing just works. I set it up once, and have since forgotten it even exists. It has never required a reboot, or any other babysitting since I bought it. Conclusion: WIN.