Episode 042 - MUG, iPad, Display Adapters, SSDs, Drobo as Time Machine Drive
it's January 31, 2010, I'm Matt Hillyer and you are listening to the Stealth Mac podcast.
Welcome to Episode 41 of The Stealth Mac Podcast, in this weeks show we talk about Mac User Groups, The announcement of the Apple iPad, using display adapters with your mac, Solid State Drives, and using a Drobo as a Time Machine drive. We have a full show this week so I suggest you grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable as we get into the content
So I've been rather busy this month - work has been super busy ramping up for a major patch deployment to our customer base and I've been rather involved in the planning stages for that project. School is also getting near the end and each week's assignment is getting more difficult in scope and requiring more of my time. I cannot wait until March 15th when school is finally over!
I've started quite a few new projects for 2010 and I'd like to share one of those with you now - I have more on the back burner and will share those on a later show but I thought this topic would be good to cover because it seems there are others out there thinking about the same thing.
Mac User Groups - that's right they are still alive and well - at least in certain areas. Not around here, however. There is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa Mac Users Group - and they are a bunch of great guys, but the group seemed small and their activities (or lack thereof) at the meetings left me wanting more. I decided I wanted to start my own group. So after some research I found that really to start a Mac Users Group there are no requirements. Just get a few people together and a meeting place and there you go, instant mac users group.
Now to become Apple recognized there is a few more requirements - from the Apple Website
There's no real reason to be recognized by Apple other than it gives you visibility on their website and you'll be assigned an Apple liaison to work with you to get resources from the mother ship.
I've already had my first meeting of the Coralville/Iowa City/North Liberty Mac Users group and we have another meeting planned for the 18th of February. If you are interested in the user group, drop on by at http://www.cmugiowa.com
Unless you were living under a rock you probably have heard on January 27th Apple announced a new product. The Apple iPad. - it's a 9.7" touchscreen device - think iPod touch, only bigger. The device will come in 3 storage sizes and retail at $499 US for the base model and going up from there. It's another $130 US for the 3g feature. The iPad will be available in late March for the WIFI version and April for the 3g version. If you want to know more - check out the apple website
I did a TSM roundtable just moments after the keynote but I had technical difficulties and can't release the recording. However, if you would like to hear more of my views on this product check out The International Mac Podcast - over at http://impodcast.tv.
Overall this is the device I have been wanting for about year now - I've been using my iPhone 3GS for a "netback" and just wish it had a bigger screen for things like web surfing and ebook reading. I think this product will fit perfectly into that slot.
Let me know what you think of the device - email me at feedback@thestealthmac.com
Now for a little rant, I hope you all don't mind. Let me give you a back story. So here I am doing keynotes for my upcoming Mac User Group meeting. I make sure everything is perfect and that the meeting place has supplied me with a projector. I bring a ton of cords and adapters and I think I'm ready for anything… guess what? I wasn't. At the very moment the meeting begins I realize that the Apple brand mini display to DVI adapter will not work with the projector cord. Why? it seems the cable the projector came with has 4 extra pins around the blade portion of the connector. If you have access to a dvi cable look at an end for a moment and you'll see what I mean. There is an array of pins on one side and a blade on the other, for some cables this blade has two pins on one side and two on the other. The Apple brand adapter is missing holes for these 4 pins. Oh man I was crushed! I worked so hard on these keynotes and I had to give them on my laptop screen - I felt like such a noob! Well after the meeting I went to newegg.com and found another adapter from bytecc - it's the same as the Apple connector but it has the four holes for those extra pins. It was $14.99 US and you can find the adapter at newegg (the link will be in the show notes)
Next meeting I'll be ready!
After listening to David Sparks of Macsparky.com and Macpowerusers Podcast fame talk about the mind numbingly fast speeds of Solid State drives I started to consider buying one. The nail in the coffin is a recent screencast performed by Don McAllister from
I finally broke down and after the holidays I purchased a 256gb Crucial Solid State drive from Other world computing.
Now a solid state drive is basically a hard drive, but made out of flash memory - like the memory used in your iPod touch or iPhone to save your data. There are no moving parts so it's incredibly fast on data throughput speeds.
If you have listened to any of my previous shows you'll know I got a dud drive and had several issues with it. I had to swap it with a new one. I even then continued to have all sorts of issues - and up until a few days ago I was still having a bug pop up here and there. Well I think as of Friday I got everything under control. My current setup as of tonight, January 31, 2010 is the 256GB SSD in the HDD bay of my mac book pro and the DVD-ROM in the optical bay.
I've been successfully running this way all weekend with no issues. Now just how much of a performance boost do you get for such a significant investment? let me give you some numbers - now keep in mind this is all manually timed using the iPhone stopwatch so there is some error to the numbers.
The times for the Apple Setup - that is 350GB 5400 RPM Drive
Time to Load OSX 10.6 from DVD - 25 m 49.5 s
Bootup from cold - 47.2 s
Login - 2.6 s
Shutdown - 3.3 s
Here are the times using the 256 GB SSD
Time to Load OSX 10.6 from DVD - 22 m 04.4 s
Bootup from cold - 37 s
Login - 2.2 s
Shutdown - 3.0 s
Battery life using both devices was about the same - I didn't do any special testing here, just used the device on a full charge doing normal activities until the machine put itself to sleep. Using both devices I got a little over 2.5 hours.
While these numbers don't show a huge improvement - I can tell you that the overall system is more responsive and that the apps launch almost instantly - rarely does any icon "bounce" on the dock more than once.
Overall I am pleased with the SSD - I hope that this stays stable so I can continue to use it as my primary drive. The one problem here is that the storage space is rather small - my iTunes library is nearing 300GB and that obviously will not fit on the SSD - so there are some storage considerations you will have to take when looking at a solid state drive.
I mentioned a few shows back that I finally got a Drobo-S from
First of all let us consider how Apple's Time Machine app works. Time Machine will take a drive and fill it with backups until that drive is full, it will then delete the oldest backups one by one as it creates a new one.
In normal circumstances this may be fine since you have an external drive just for that purpose, but what if you want to use that drive for other things as well? The Drobo falls into this category.
The first alternative is to partition the drive - lets say you have a 1TB drive, you could partition 500GB for the Time Machine Backup and the 500GB for data, that way the Time Machine backups will not eat into your data storage partition. This is an option for the Drobo, but not one I considered and once you put data on the Drobo (or any other drive for that matter) this option really isn't viable.
The next alternative for the Drobo is to use a script called Time Tamer - this is an Apple Automator script that will create a sparse image bundle 1.5 times the size of your hard drive - this will keep your time machine backups contained to the sparse bundle. This works great for backing up - but I found a few issues with this solution.
1. when you use the time machine app - the star field comes up and the only time you can choose from is "now" - this is actually a known bug, what you have to do is first mount the sparse image and then option click on the time machine icon in the menu bar and then choose "browse other time machine disks." this will then bring up your backups - a workable solution yet wonky. I did use the record feature of Automator and made a script that would do this at the click of a mouse but after a while I just didn't like this work around
2. the second reason I found this solution to be a bad idea is when my computer crashed on the 27th - I put in the Snow Leopard disk and tried to mount the time machine volume - only I found there to be an issue, see to mount the drobo you have to have the drobo dashboard loaded. You can't load this software when booting from the drive, so for me to restore I would had to of loaded a fresh copy of OSX on the drive, then loaded drobo dashboard and then mounted the time machine backup as described in the above section, then I'd have to restore the HD. Too much convoluted work if you ask me!
Overall the Drobo is a great storage solution but I think using it as a time machine backup drive is a bad idea, so what I've done now is use a 1TB USB drive partitioned into two parts, both 500GB each. One is my Time Machine backup and the other partition is my super duper backup. My next step will be to write a script to copy these partitions over to the Drobo late at night.
Well that will wrap it up for show number 42 - I hope you enjoyed this show. If you have any questions, comments, or submissions, feel free to send them to me at
Welcome to Episode 41 of The Stealth Mac Podcast, in this weeks show we talk about Mac User Groups, The announcement of the Apple iPad, using display adapters with your mac, Solid State Drives, and using a Drobo as a Time Machine drive. We have a full show this week so I suggest you grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable as we get into the content
So I've been rather busy this month - work has been super busy ramping up for a major patch deployment to our customer base and I've been rather involved in the planning stages for that project. School is also getting near the end and each week's assignment is getting more difficult in scope and requiring more of my time. I cannot wait until March 15th when school is finally over!
I've started quite a few new projects for 2010 and I'd like to share one of those with you now - I have more on the back burner and will share those on a later show but I thought this topic would be good to cover because it seems there are others out there thinking about the same thing.
Mac User Groups - that's right they are still alive and well - at least in certain areas. Not around here, however. There is a Cedar Rapids, Iowa Mac Users Group - and they are a bunch of great guys, but the group seemed small and their activities (or lack thereof) at the meetings left me wanting more. I decided I wanted to start my own group. So after some research I found that really to start a Mac Users Group there are no requirements. Just get a few people together and a meeting place and there you go, instant mac users group.
Now to become Apple recognized there is a few more requirements - from the Apple Website
There's no real reason to be recognized by Apple other than it gives you visibility on their website and you'll be assigned an Apple liaison to work with you to get resources from the mother ship.
I've already had my first meeting of the Coralville/Iowa City/North Liberty Mac Users group and we have another meeting planned for the 18th of February. If you are interested in the user group, drop on by at http://www.cmugiowa.com
Unless you were living under a rock you probably have heard on January 27th Apple announced a new product. The Apple iPad. - it's a 9.7" touchscreen device - think iPod touch, only bigger. The device will come in 3 storage sizes and retail at $499 US for the base model and going up from there. It's another $130 US for the 3g feature. The iPad will be available in late March for the WIFI version and April for the 3g version. If you want to know more - check out the apple website
I did a TSM roundtable just moments after the keynote but I had technical difficulties and can't release the recording. However, if you would like to hear more of my views on this product check out The International Mac Podcast - over at http://impodcast.tv.
Overall this is the device I have been wanting for about year now - I've been using my iPhone 3GS for a "netback" and just wish it had a bigger screen for things like web surfing and ebook reading. I think this product will fit perfectly into that slot.
Let me know what you think of the device - email me at feedback@thestealthmac.com
Now for a little rant, I hope you all don't mind. Let me give you a back story. So here I am doing keynotes for my upcoming Mac User Group meeting. I make sure everything is perfect and that the meeting place has supplied me with a projector. I bring a ton of cords and adapters and I think I'm ready for anything… guess what? I wasn't. At the very moment the meeting begins I realize that the Apple brand mini display to DVI adapter will not work with the projector cord. Why? it seems the cable the projector came with has 4 extra pins around the blade portion of the connector. If you have access to a dvi cable look at an end for a moment and you'll see what I mean. There is an array of pins on one side and a blade on the other, for some cables this blade has two pins on one side and two on the other. The Apple brand adapter is missing holes for these 4 pins. Oh man I was crushed! I worked so hard on these keynotes and I had to give them on my laptop screen - I felt like such a noob! Well after the meeting I went to newegg.com and found another adapter from bytecc - it's the same as the Apple connector but it has the four holes for those extra pins. It was $14.99 US and you can find the adapter at newegg (the link will be in the show notes)
Next meeting I'll be ready!
After listening to David Sparks of Macsparky.com and Macpowerusers Podcast fame talk about the mind numbingly fast speeds of Solid State drives I started to consider buying one. The nail in the coffin is a recent screencast performed by Don McAllister from
I finally broke down and after the holidays I purchased a 256gb Crucial Solid State drive from Other world computing.
Now a solid state drive is basically a hard drive, but made out of flash memory - like the memory used in your iPod touch or iPhone to save your data. There are no moving parts so it's incredibly fast on data throughput speeds.
If you have listened to any of my previous shows you'll know I got a dud drive and had several issues with it. I had to swap it with a new one. I even then continued to have all sorts of issues - and up until a few days ago I was still having a bug pop up here and there. Well I think as of Friday I got everything under control. My current setup as of tonight, January 31, 2010 is the 256GB SSD in the HDD bay of my mac book pro and the DVD-ROM in the optical bay.
I've been successfully running this way all weekend with no issues. Now just how much of a performance boost do you get for such a significant investment? let me give you some numbers - now keep in mind this is all manually timed using the iPhone stopwatch so there is some error to the numbers.
The times for the Apple Setup - that is 350GB 5400 RPM Drive
Time to Load OSX 10.6 from DVD - 25 m 49.5 s
Bootup from cold - 47.2 s
Login - 2.6 s
Shutdown - 3.3 s
Here are the times using the 256 GB SSD
Time to Load OSX 10.6 from DVD - 22 m 04.4 s
Bootup from cold - 37 s
Login - 2.2 s
Shutdown - 3.0 s
Battery life using both devices was about the same - I didn't do any special testing here, just used the device on a full charge doing normal activities until the machine put itself to sleep. Using both devices I got a little over 2.5 hours.
While these numbers don't show a huge improvement - I can tell you that the overall system is more responsive and that the apps launch almost instantly - rarely does any icon "bounce" on the dock more than once.
Overall I am pleased with the SSD - I hope that this stays stable so I can continue to use it as my primary drive. The one problem here is that the storage space is rather small - my iTunes library is nearing 300GB and that obviously will not fit on the SSD - so there are some storage considerations you will have to take when looking at a solid state drive.
I mentioned a few shows back that I finally got a Drobo-S from
First of all let us consider how Apple's Time Machine app works. Time Machine will take a drive and fill it with backups until that drive is full, it will then delete the oldest backups one by one as it creates a new one.
In normal circumstances this may be fine since you have an external drive just for that purpose, but what if you want to use that drive for other things as well? The Drobo falls into this category.
The first alternative is to partition the drive - lets say you have a 1TB drive, you could partition 500GB for the Time Machine Backup and the 500GB for data, that way the Time Machine backups will not eat into your data storage partition. This is an option for the Drobo, but not one I considered and once you put data on the Drobo (or any other drive for that matter) this option really isn't viable.
The next alternative for the Drobo is to use a script called Time Tamer - this is an Apple Automator script that will create a sparse image bundle 1.5 times the size of your hard drive - this will keep your time machine backups contained to the sparse bundle. This works great for backing up - but I found a few issues with this solution.
1. when you use the time machine app - the star field comes up and the only time you can choose from is "now" - this is actually a known bug, what you have to do is first mount the sparse image and then option click on the time machine icon in the menu bar and then choose "browse other time machine disks." this will then bring up your backups - a workable solution yet wonky. I did use the record feature of Automator and made a script that would do this at the click of a mouse but after a while I just didn't like this work around
2. the second reason I found this solution to be a bad idea is when my computer crashed on the 27th - I put in the Snow Leopard disk and tried to mount the time machine volume - only I found there to be an issue, see to mount the drobo you have to have the drobo dashboard loaded. You can't load this software when booting from the drive, so for me to restore I would had to of loaded a fresh copy of OSX on the drive, then loaded drobo dashboard and then mounted the time machine backup as described in the above section, then I'd have to restore the HD. Too much convoluted work if you ask me!
Overall the Drobo is a great storage solution but I think using it as a time machine backup drive is a bad idea, so what I've done now is use a 1TB USB drive partitioned into two parts, both 500GB each. One is my Time Machine backup and the other partition is my super duper backup. My next step will be to write a script to copy these partitions over to the Drobo late at night.
Well that will wrap it up for show number 42 - I hope you enjoyed this show. If you have any questions, comments, or submissions, feel free to send them to me at