Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'apple' articles

External SATA storage for the Macbook Pro

2007-01-18T00:20:24Z

Here's a mini-review of my new external storage arrangements for the Macbook Pro.

Thanks to my music collection, an appetite for shooting photos in RAW format, and general untidiness I'm not exactly blessed with spare space. Something had to be done.

The solution I came up with was an IcyBox IB-360StUS-BL external SATA/USB2 enclosure, wired to a Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter.

Icybox IB-360StUS-BL enclosure

Enclosure

The IcyBox is such an affordable little box that it seems silly not to have one to hand as a precaution, especially given the cheapness of hard drives these days. The enclosure is convection cooled, so has no noisy fan, and is an a reasonably attractive alumnium package that fits in with the look of the Macbook Pro quite well. The blue LED is switchable, just in case you don't want that bling look on your desktop.

Inside the enclosure there's both PATA and SATA connectors. I chose to use a SATA drive, a Samsung HD400LJ. There are two headers for connecting a SATA drive. One goes to the USB 2 adapter, one straight to the outside of the enclosure for wiring to a SATA port on the computer.

Four screws secure the hard drive in its tray. The tray then slides into the frame and is secured by four screws in the base. I didn't find it that easy to get these in, but they seemed secure enough once screwed in.

The IcyBox comes with plenty of cables, including a SATA-SATA cable, a bracket to relocate an internal SATA port to the PCI card cover on a regular PC, and a USB cable. The power supply is of the external brick sort.

SATA adapter

The other half of the equation is the Sonnet Tempo Express 34 SATA adapter. This fits into the Macbook Pro's Express Card port — you knew that something had to eventually, eh? The Tempo card features two eSATA ports, which are of a different design to the SATA ports featured on the Icybox. This means you need to buy an eSATA-SATA cable. You can either spend $20 on one from Sonnet themselves, or get a cheaper unbranded one for about the tenth of the price: just make sure its reasonably well shielded.

Once plugged in, the external drive shows up on the Mac as a SCSI device, and behaves like any removable media. As such, it needs to be unmounted from the desktop before you eject the Tempo card.

The only bug with the Tempo card I've found is that things don't seem to work that well if you boot the machine with the card inserted. The very helpful people from Sonnet tell me this is an issue with the underlying Silicon Image chipset, and they're working on sorting it out. (I was very impressed with the technical knowledge, friendliness and speed of response from Sonnet's support department.)

Performance

I'm no benchmarking guru, but it's clear that the external Samsung HD400LJ outperforms my internal 7200rpm SATA drive on the Macbook Pro. Brief experiments with XBench suggested that this performance boost was probably between 20 and 40%. It's certainly vastly preferable to the performance hit you get when you use a USB or Firewire 400 drive with the MBP.

Conclusion

It's early days yet, but I'm happy with my new setup. The extra port on the Tempo adapter allows for the connection of another drive, or if I use Sonnet's own products, up to 10 drives! I feel happier knowing the disk isn't competing for attention with all the other USB gadgets I have plugged in. The other big plus point for me is the quietness of the Icybox/Samsung combination.

Links:

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Living and coding on a Mac

2006-10-03T17:37:09Z

For most of this year I've been working mainly on a Macbook Pro, having deserted my Ubuntu desktop. Somebody wrote to me recently, kindly enquiring how this life was going, and asking some questions in particular.

Although of limited interest to some, I decided to answer the mail here, if for nothing else to record my views for future reference.

Q: How is developing on a Mac? Is TextMate really that good?

Developing Rails applications on a Mac is sweet, and yes, TextMate really is that good. My jilted .emacs languishes in lonely misery.

Developing other (non-Mac) stuff on a Mac is a real pain however, because nothing's where you'd expect it after years of Linux use. Like several other developers I've seen, I run Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine under Parallels for such work.

It's not just that Macs lack apt-get (as you can get it with fink), it's that they lack the reliability of Debian or Ubuntu's package repositories to underpin it. Running Linux in a virtual machine is far easier.

On the subject of TextMate, perhaps the best compliment I can pay it is that using it reminds me of the last text editors I really felt at home in, CygnusEd and then FrexxEd on the Amiga. TextMate's most serious flaw is the inability to create split views, however. It seems to me that's a key programmers' feature, to be able to read from one source file at the same time as editing another.

Q: Is the hype about Ruby on Rails true?

I still think so. I resisted it for 6 months because I tend to be averse to anything that gets such a large amount of publicity, but then stepped aboard the train around the time of Rails 0.13.

I've not really looked back after my initial experiments seemed to bear out the claim of developing "ten times faster than PHP". I'll admit I find it hard to keep up with all the extra developments that get added at the Rails cutting edge, but then again I don't really need them. Most of those additions are refinements, rather than core changes. Constraints on my time mean I tend to write in a common Rails subset, as opposed to flexing my muscles with the obscure but clever bits.

Even if your taste isn't for Rails, then the trend that Rails, Django and friends have started is improving the web development playing field for all.

Q: What makes you happy and sad about the Mac?

The things that the Mac still scores on are:

Fonts, fonts, fonts. Despite all my many efforts at getting good letterforms on Linux, I still couldn't make it as good as OS X.
Productivity applications. I love my OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. I'm salivating over the prospect of OmniFocus, and Quicksilver rocks my world.
Hardware. Suspend/resume without worry, video conferencing that works.

The interesting thing to me is that none of these are very difficult to surmount, for want of a little resource. The day of the Linux desktop, so perennially around the corner, will yet come.

As a balancing postscript, I will mention that there are some things that are Mac irritants to a sensible Linux person, which include filesystem case sensitivity, lack of decent SSH agent (yes, I've tried them all), not knowing what to kill -9 when things go pear-shaped, Apple's arrogance, crippled nature of some default apps (iChat won't put multiple accounts in the same window, Safari doesn't support keyboard navigation at all well, Quicktime player won't play movies fullscreen).

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Catching up

2006-04-10T23:15:22Z

Most of my energy recently has been devoted to organising things for XTech 2006, now just over a month away.

Here are some XTech-related snippets:

Mozilla Corporation has joined as a co-host. We'll have six Mozilla related presentations, plus a keynote about JavaScript 2 from Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich.
The Ajax Developers' Day continues to take shape. We're looking to add a Ajax toolkit lightning demo session at the end of the day. Contact me if you or your company wants to take part in this.
BarCamp Amsterdam II will be taking place directly after XTech. This will be a free-form participant-led conference, held over the weekend. Many XTech speakers and attendees are likely to hang around to take part.

MacBook

My new computer has arrived, an Apple MacBook Pro. I know I wrote some time ago about how disappointing it was for free software advocates to be using a non-free OS, and I am rather sad about this in some ways. I'll be writing in the near future about my impressions of the platform, and reasons for buying this machine.

Writing

My latest piece on Debian has been published over at O'Reilly, Installing Software on Debian. We've been a little slow getting through the publication of these, so I'll try and hurry the next few along.

Rails

Rails continues to impress. I wish I had more time than I do to use it, as it feels so right to work with. With Matt Biddulph I'll be teaching a day on Rails at XTech 2006. In the meantime, I highly recommend Chad Fowler's Rails Recipes, it covers the most common requirements from real-world web applications.

Oh, and I'm scheduled to attend RailsConf this June. My paper was (not too surprisingly) declined for the conference, but Matt's was accepted.

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Come hither

2006-03-09T10:42:29Z

From the changelog for the Ubuntu kernel:

linux-source-2.6.15 (2.6.15-17.25) dapper; urgency=low
  ... 
    * Enable EFI for x86 (MacBook Pro, come hither).

Ordered.

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On the internet, everyone can see your underpants

2006-01-20T23:20:36Z

The controversy over Apple's "photocast" extensions, and the strangeness of their iTunes RSS enhancements, is illustrative of the transition that software companies need to make as they become web-enabled. It's no longer enough to make your applications and hardware pretty and functional, but the guts that other people get to see must look good too.

This is one reason that people prefer RELAX NG over XML Schema, for instance. Where markup is concerned, it turns out that the excuse "only computers will read it, and we'll provide tools to generate it" doesn't cut it. The web's had a view-source mentality since it started, and the aesthetics of markup matter a great deal.

They matter not only because they're nice for geeks to look at, but also because well-structured and standards-compliant markup is simply more interoperable. The end user experience is ultimately improved.

Microsoft now gets this, I think. It's not hard--you just need to have your engineers exposed to the web, not hidden in some blinkered bunker.

It's a shame that Apple doesn't yet understand that the aesthetics of markup count. Even their new web tool, iWeb, lacks somewhat in this department. Apple do so well in the rest of the computing experience, these poor web efforts really stand out. It was rather sad to read the disappointment OS X-hugging web developers felt with the iPhoto RSS use.

Will Apple "get" the web better someday? I hope so, because we'll all benefit.

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