After installing the Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe 240GB SSD drive, I felt its performance was a bit sluggish so I ran some speed tests. I used XBench.app but because that app is older than dirt, the results were a bit misleading. A Mushkin rep suggested AJA System Test because it’s specifically geared toward testing read/write speeds on drives. One cool feature is that you can test external drives, including USB memory sticks.

Anyway, here’s the screenshot showing the read/write speeds. Indeed, 182.1 MB/s write is crappy for the Mushkin SSD, especially with the advertised speed of 275 MB/s. The 235.7 MB/s read is pretty nice.

This is how I set up two Solid State Drives (SSD) in my 17″ MacBook Pro.

For the last year or so, I’ve been struggling with the storage limitations of my 128GB SSD drive. With my professional photography, photos of my baby girls and client files alone, I was sorely lacking hard drive space. Distributing files across several external drives worked for a little while, but then just got too complex. Nothing sucks worse than having to sort through several external drives to find a photo when you’re on a deadline.

To solve my storage dilemma, I decided to add a second SSD drive to my MacBook Pro. I decided against adding a standard spinning hard drive because of the draw it would take on my battery – that and the heartbreaking drop in performance if I was editing massive photos from the standard drive.

I know OWC sells very nice internal 2.5″ drive bays for the MacBook Pro. They run about $75. There are other companies that sell similar drive bays for $90-ish. I found one on eBay for about $30 with shipping. It’s generic and not as pretty as the OWC version, but it fits and works fine.

For the second drive, I bought the Mushkin Enhanced Callisto Deluxe 240GB drive from newegg.com. It had the best ratings at the time, and it was hard to argue with 285MBs/275MBs read & write times.

These photos show the progression from single drive + DVD to dual SSD with no DVD.

Removing the screws from the MacBook Pro. The first time is slow – maybe 2-3 minutes. I can get in and out of the MBP case now in under 60 seconds.

This is the original 128GB Corsair P128 Solid State Drive I bought in 2009. It was running slowly due to outdated firmware and no effing firmware tool for Mac systems. I had to pull the drive, clone it to another drive, pop it in a Dell laptop to run the firmware update (which erased the drive) and then re-clone my data back. After the firmware update, the drive ran almost as fast as the day I bought it.

From the Department of Obvious Statements: the Mushkin SSD is exactly the same size as the Corsair drive. Same size, same weight.

To employ the second drive in the MacBook Pro, you need to pull the SuperDrive out of its snuggly, warm spot near the logicboard. Note: with your MBP case open, find yourself a can of compressed air and blow out the fans. You’ll see that mine were a little nasty. Clean fans = cool, fast laptop.

Be super careful removing the screws and the paper-thin SATA cable (the orange tab just to the right of the SuperDrive).

Once the SuperDrive has been removed, you can buy an external adapter to continue using it to read/write DVDs. External adapters cost about $20. Personally, I’m over the 8X speed and went with a 22X drive. More on that later.

Next, the secondary SSD is placed in the new drive bay. It fits very snugly and the drive height seemed about 1/2mm too much, but once the drive & bay were inserted into the SuperDrive spot, it fit perfectly. Oh, and don’t forget to put the little SATA cable back in place on the logicboard.

Here’s the P128 SSD in the drive bay, in the SuperDrive slot. And 8GB RAM from newegg. Twas $600 when it first came out, then $300 last summer. I got mine for $120 in November 2010. Last week, I saw it on sale for under $70. Good lordy, how prices change.

Here’s where I cloned the P128 with my OS X and files over to the new Mushkin 240GB SSD. Cloning SSD to SSD is pretty fast – roughly 2GB/minute.

Once the cloning is done and MacBook Pro is rebooted, I wiped the old drive clean for use as storage.

Lessons from using Dual SSDs in the MacBook Pro:
Lesson 1: Using the 240GB drive as the primary was a rookie mistake. I think I was tired (twins up all night) and not thinking right. The 128GB SSD should have been the primary with the 240GB used for all that fantastic, high-speed storage, scratch disk, etc. (Now I remember – the Mushkin drive was about 60MB/s faster than the Corsair and served better as the main drive.)
Lesson 2: FTLOG, OMG, keep a daily backup routine. Even though Solid State Drives like the Muskin Calisto 240GB have a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) rating of 2 million hours, you never know when it’s going to just puke on you and die. Unlike platter drives, SSD drives are very, very difficult to recover data from. My Mushkin drive died in under 30 days. Completely unresponsive. Not even visible connected to an external drive dock. Just friking dead. Gone. Toast. Mushkin said it happens to 1 in 1,000 drives, cannot be anticipated, prevented or recovered from.
Lesson 3: Again, backup to TimeMachine, Dropbox, Mozy, ZumoDrive, or whatever external, off-drive solution you like best; just make sure you do it daily. I use all four of those options concurrently. 50GB with Mozy, 2GB with Dropbox, 3GB with ZumoDrive and a 2TB FireWire 800 drive for TimeMachine.
Lesson 4: The potential of an SSD failure is not related to dual-drive action but just the facts of life in the hard drive world. You may get the 2 million hours of use from your drive (roughly 228 years – good luck testing that out!) but you also may get 20,000 hours, or just 200. A note in fairness – my Corsair P128 SSD has never had an issue and has been running strong, 20 hours per day, since June 2009.
Lesson 5: Running dual SSDs in a MacBook Pro is really quite awesome. To have extra storage, a super fast scratch disk, etc. is simply beautiful. If your MBP is out of warranty and/or you don’t mind risking warranty repairs, and if you don’t need to burn DVDs while on the road, then the dual SSD setup could work well for you.

Trying to use PHP code in .html and/or .htm files on MediaTemple? Modify your existing .htaccess file with the following:

Before:
AddHandler php5-script .php

After:
AddHandler php5-script .php .html .htm

That will allow the MediaTemple servers to consider .html and .htm files valid extensions for running PHP code.

Ever since I got my iPhone 4, I get occasional emails dated 1969, long before email was even around. The ’69 emails are all blank and empty and cannot be opened. They just populate the inbox and reproduce until I reboot the iPhone. Then they go away for a few days, maybe a week or so, then they sneak back in, one at a time. What the heck is this behavior? If anyone knows, please fill me in.

As I mentioned a long, long time ago on this site, I upgraded my 17″ MacBook Pro with a Corsair 128GB SSD. The speed was astounding… for the first 5-6 months. Then things started to slow down. It started to get obvious when I was working on numerous video and photo files at the same time – like 30 or 40 files going at once. I chalked it up to a bottleneck in some part of the hardware and hoped that a reboot, a PRAM reset or even some Onyx action would solve the issue and the speeds would go back to normal. This worked a little here and there, but as time went by, the SSD just got slower and slower. A few weeks back, I got fed up with the SSD; it had become just as slow as a standard platter hard drive. That’s sacrilege in the SSD world. My own beloved SSD had become the enemy of my productivity.

To combat my new nemesis, I searched the Google and found the most promising article at this website here. I read with excitement until I clicked on the link for the software – it’s a paid app called DiskTester… and not a cheap one at $40.

The free option…

I believe there’s always a free way to get what you need, so I began racking my brain. It occurred to me – OS X has Disk Utility.app built in. Duh! It can create volumes of very specific sizes, which seems to be the same function DiskTester is performing when it’s running its “recondition” option.

Here’s what I did:

• used CarbonCopyCloner to clone my SSD to a nice 1TB drive on a Firewire 800 dock.
• booted from the external drive into my clone OS.
• opened Disk Utility and selected the SSD.
  • ran the “erase” function on the SSD.
  • ran the partition function – selecting 1 partition for the volume scheme.
  • repeated the partition with 16 partitions
  • reduced the drive back to one Mac OS Extended Journaled partition.
• erased free space on the drive (seems unnecessary in retrospect)
• clicked on the “New Image” icon at the top of Disk Utility’s screen. I selected the SSD as the target volume and made a DMG file to the size of the SSD itself, 128.04GB. Disk Utility created the image and the SSD was left with about 21.61MB remaining. I repeated the action with a 21.6MB image file on the SSD. This left the SSD with only a few KB of empty space. Sufficient.
• insterted the OS X Snow Leopard DVD in my MacBook Pro and rebooted to the installation DVD. I ran the OS X setup as a new computer, not using the CarbonCopyCloner image. I figured a fresh installation would eliminate any detritus from tons and tons of use. I was right. The fresh copy was much better.
• during the Snow Leopard installation process, I opted to import settings, apps, emails and documents from the 1TB clone. OS X put everything in perfect order for me. My work environment was back to the way it had started.

The entire process took about 90 minutes. I got it done during two episodes of Castle.

Here are some pics:

So what happened?

The Disk Utility-reconditioned SSD was indeed much faster than before the whole process. Boot times were almost back to day-1 speeds, applications opened super fast and I was able to get back to hard core production.

One caveat - I learned that the SSD should not be used as a target disk for bittorrent files or for other apps that intentionally create highly fragmented files. Literally hundreds or thousands of files downloaded in countless tiny fragments simply screw the SSD sideways. It just can’t handle that kind of intentionally fragmented data, not in that kind of volume. So now I use an external 1TB drive for my bittorrent and other downloads. The SSD seems way better off without that constant pounding.

Hopefully my sharing this with you folks helps a little. You may opt to buy DiskTester for $40 (I’m not saying you shouldn’t – I’m sure it has TONS of useful features and all with shining merit), but if you’re like me, you may want a free option that does a similar, if not nearly identical function. As an old friend used to say, “Free is the best price.”

Hey folks. I’ve got some Google Wave invites available in case anyone out there is still searching for one. Leave a note or email me if you want me to hook you up. =)

Hey folks – here are two new desktop images made from photos taken in downtown Portland, Oregon. The images are 1920×1200 and will scale down nicely for most widescreen monitors. Enjoy!

Glass building…

Church tower…

One of my favorite laptop accessories is/was made by an Oregon company and sold in local Mac Stores. They’re the ever useful and popular Dr. Bodelin’s laptop bumpers. The laptop bumpers raise the back end laptops up by about 1″ or so, dramatically increasing air flow thereby reducing internal and external temperatures. Ultimately, this can extend the life expectancy of a laptop. For $10, it’s a pretty good deal. Anyway, I recently needed a new set of silver laptop feet, so I called the Mac Store closest to me. I was mortified to find that they no longer carried the silver ones and that they only had white or gold. Gold?! Ugh. And white laptop feet on an aluminum MacBook Pro?? The horror. Being somewhat resourceful, I called Dr. Bodelin’s customer service line to see if the silver feet were really gone. Yup, confirmed. Not even a private stash at the company headquarters. Frak.

I did some Googling and found very few alternatives – some looked flimsy, some were bulky, some were plain ugly and they were all way too expensive for what they are – molded plastic nubs.
 

What to do…

As you can see here, the MacBook Pro has less than half a millimeter of airspace underneath. It’s part of Apple’s super sleek design, but it naturally restricts significant air flow.

I’ve used two 3M “Self Stick Rubber Pads” under the laptop and right next to the paper-thin feet Apple supplied.

Here you can see the MacBook Pro with the 3M rubber pads – the back is raised by about 1/4″. The pads hold up under moderate heat. Super warm laptops may eventually turn the 3M glue a little gooey. It takes a bit of heat, though. The 3M rubber pads cost $2.50 for 12 – enough for 6 laptops or 6 applications.


 

The solution I went with…

The MacBook Pro is lifted by roughly 1/2″, providing extra air flow. The 3M mini hook is strong, gives a very comfortable angle of lift for ergonomic typing, etc. The 3M mini hooks are $3.50 for a set of 6, enough for 3 laptops or 3 applications.

Here are the two 3M packages. I got mine at The Container Store, but they’re available in lots of stores. And not to be too obvious, but #1 is the 3M rubber feet ($2.50) and #2 is the 3M mini hooks ($3.50).

 

Every once in a while I get a chance to take a break from my 7-day-a-week tech gigs and enjoy a good glass of beer or wine. This is one of the recent additions to my little wine collection – Purple Hands. The table wine is a blend – 85% Oregon Merlot, 10% Oregon Pinot Noir, 5% Cabernet Franc – and is incredibly smooth on tannin, rich with dark berry, plum and mineral spice, with slight hints of dark chocolate. If you’re a wine lover, check this one out.

Like the booboo with .zip files, my installation of Snow Leopard was also having trouble opening .dmg and .pkg files. Installer.app would freeze. Bugger! After a little digging, the simple solution is to delete the “com.apple.finder.plist” file from your /Library/Preferences folder and log out/login or simply reboot. Fixed.

After updating my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, I noticed that I was unable to open .zip archives. I use The Unarchiver to open my Mac and PC-compatible archives. When I attempted to open a zip file, Unarchiver had been overtaken by Snow Leopard’s “Archive Utility”, and the Archive Utility.app kept freezing and required numerous Force Quits. I went through all kinds of debug actions, but nothing fixed the perplexing problem. I checked Google and found only one forum thread, but folks were suggesting that “Stuffit Expander” be used instead of Snow Leopard’s default utility. That’s not a solution, but a side-step around a critical booboo.

I recloned my hard drive and prepared to wipe everything and install a fresh copy of Snow Leopard. Literally on the verge of rebooting for the clean-sweep, I opened Disk Utility and ran the “Repair Disk Permissions” and “Verify Disk” functions.

Lo and behold, the zip archives are now opening with Snow Leopard’s built-in Archive Utility (which no longer freezes up). I re-installed Unarchiver and reset it as the default unzip app. All’s well, and I saved myself an evening of reinstalling all my apps. Phew!

If anyone else out there Googles “Snow Leopard won’t unzip” or “Archive Utility.app not working”, I hope they land here for the quick and easy fix.

I decided to make a clean installation of OS X Leopard last night. I had already used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my Leopard installation DVD to an 8GB partition on one of my USB memory sticks. Having the OS X installation DVD on USB is awesome.

At the tick of 5:44pm, I rebooted my MacBook Pro 1) with the USB memory key attached and 2) while holding the alt/option key down to select a boot drive. I selected the OS X installation partition and opted for the “erase and install” option.

The installation was complete and the system rebooted at 5:53pm. I got through the final setup screens and had the new OS X desktop under my control at 5:54pm. Total time: 10 minutes!

Why was this clean installation so fast? The USB flash memory to SSD flash memory data transfer is much faster than DVD to SSD, and dramatically faster than DVD to spinning HDD.

As a side note, when installing OS X from a flash drive, you don’t have to wait for the standard integrity check of the installation DVD – the verification effort is automatically skipped. I’ve always ditched that step anyway, but for those who allow verification to continue, a good deal of valuable time can be lost. Just another benefit of going all-flash.

After toying with the Seagate 500GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro for about 6 weeks, I realized that I needed an even faster drive to push through my photo and video projects. After conducting a ton of research and grieving over the expense, I decided to ‘invest’ in the Corsair P128 CMFSSD-128GBG2D at newegg.com.

There were two things that really sold me on the Corsair P128: the 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds and the 128MB cache. The read/write speeds are near top of the line for SSDs. The Corsair’s 128MB cache is simply staggering compared to the average 8MB or 16MB cache on standard laptop hard drives (16MB cache for the 500GB Seagate).

The P128 is the exact length, height and width as the 500GB Seagate. The P128, however, is much, much lighter.

Here are some simple before and afters:

Here’s the P128 getting mounted in the drive bay:

Dropping from 500GB storage was a bit of a mental hurdle, but I really value speed over size. That’s what external drives are for.

After a few days using the P128, I’m very satisfied. The price still makes me wince, though. Ouch.

I went ahead and picked up the granddaddy of all laptop hard drives for my MacBook Pro – the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM with SATA 3.0 (model ST9500420AS). I upgraded from a Hitachi 320GB 7200RPM drive and boy, what a wonderful difference!

Using Carbon Copy Cloner, it took roughly 3 1/2 hours to clone the contents of my 320GB drive to the 500GB. 120GB of photos was the #1 slow down, and #2 was the 320GB drive dragging its proverbial feet. Once the cloning was done, replacing the 320 with the 500 took about 2 minutes – 5 little screws (1 brace and 4 stabilizers on the drive).

The first thing I noticed was that the 500GB Seagate drive boots about 40% faster than the 320GB Hitachi. Apps open up a little faster – not 40% faster, but certainly 20% or so.

Once I’d booted up, I ran several tests and scans on the drive to make sure the drive was going to be stable and error free. Nothing sucks quite so much as banking on a new hard drive, only to have it melt down. Tests showed no drive flaws.

I then ran an XBench test to compare the two drives. The 500GB drive scored well over twice as fast as the 320GB with sequential and random reads/writes. For the non-techies, this simply means that this new Seagate drive whips the snot out of the Hitachi drive.

(XBench is a free utility that every Mac user should have, even if it’s rarely used.)

On the down side, the Seagate drive is just as loud as the 320GB Hitachi. That was a little disappointment to me. That said, the drive isn’t “noisy” per se, it’s just that the spinning is clearly audible in a near silent room or if one listens within 6 or 7 inches of the laptop body. No huge deal.

Other positives? XP boots and runs faster in Parallels. So does Windows 7. So does Linux. Photoshop CS4 opens up 25% faster and runs actions in an instant. File transfers to other 7200RPM drives are way faster. In short, pretty much everything is better and faster.

The best part of all? After Leopard, tons of apps, tens of thousands of photos, etc. I’ve got about 300GB free. Awesome!!

If you’re considering buying the Seagate 500GB drive, I hope these comments help. And hopefully you wind up with a good stable drive that passes any tests you subject it to.

A few quick thoughts on how to make Apple a little greener:

Over the last few years, Apple has been reducing the size of it’s product packaging. Some packaging has been reduced by well over 50% – iPod/iPhone cases, MacBook and MacBook Pro boxes, etc. Software packaging (like that for OS X Leopard, iLife, iWork, etc.) has been dropped by about 75% in size, which is really great for the environment (and for Apple’s profit margin – win win).

After getting a new MacBook Pro, I was looking at the installation DVDs for OSX and iLife. They’re still DVDs – ostensibly an aging medium, especially with USB sticks and other flash memory becoming so widely available and inexpensive.

I think it’d make sense for Apple to ditch future OS X installation DVDs in favor of a locked USB installation device (or even SDHC card with a USB reader). Every Intel-based Apple computer, whether an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, comes with USB ports and can boot directly from those USB ports. USB data transfer speeds are much better than DVD transfer, so theoretically, OS X installation or repair could be greatly improved via USB.

Price is one thing to consider. I know USB flash memory is higher priced than DVD disks, but in bulk, USB drives can’t be too expensive. Besides, Apple would be able to drop packaging sizes by at least another 50-75%, saving more money and earning an even better reputation.

I’ll bet even Greenpeace would give a thumbs-up. Maybe. Those guys are tough to please! (I remember when Greenpeace was warm & fuzzy, all about hippies saving the whales and seal cubs. Seems like such a long time ago.)
 

Well, it looks like the new MacBook Pro (aluminum unibody) is giving users a little frustration in the video department. One of the “hot, new, awesome” features of the new MacBook Pro is the dualie high powered video card – the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M.

The problem? When the MBP is connected to an external display and then goes to sleep for x-period of time and then wakes, something tweaks and the video card gets the delirium tremens, causing the external display to get all confused and flashing with static. Here’s what it looks like:

(Audio has been removed from this clip.)

Fortunately, unplugging the external display from the DisplayPort adapter and then plugging it back in seems to remedy the spasm, but it requires manual intervention (which is very un-Apple). Some folks on the Apple forums report that a full reboot or PRAM reset give temporary relief from the static.

Update: Within minutes of making this post, Apple released a firmware update for the unibody MacBook Pro that’s targeted (in part) at fixing this issue.
 

Update part deux: The firmware update fixed the video static. Thanks Apple!
 

I was out in the vineyards really early this morning taking some photos of the post-harvest vines. It was still pretty dark out because the fog was so thick, but the sun was huge (like a harvest moon) and bright enough to illuminate its own shape through the mist.

I snapped this shot not knowing if it would turn out as good as it looked in real life. Not too shabby!

I used my Rebel XTi with a Canon EF 50mm lens (1.4) set at f/6.3 and 1/1000 second.

 
What I like about this photo is that it looks like the moon rising over the barn and trees, but it’s really the sun. Très cool.
 

After Apple generously replaced my ailing 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with the new unibody 2.4GHz MacBook Pro, I went from 4GB down to 2GB RAM. Even though the new MBP has a faster bus speed and better hard drive, I felt the shortage of RAM when using Final Cut, Photoshop and Parallels.

Crucial and newegg to the rescue! I ordered a pair of DDR3 1067Mhz RAM chips for $125. That’s pretty affordable!

Here are a few shots to illustrate how easy it is to upgrade the RAM (and, coincidentally, the hard drive) in the new MacBook Pro and MacBook. Thankfully, upgrading RAM and hard drives on the new unibody MacBook Pro is easy and won’t void or risk the warranty. (Just don’t sneeze or drool onto the logic board when doing work and you should be fine.)

 
First, remove the battery plate and battery. This exposes the hard drive for easy replacement if you ever want to upgrade to a 320GB 7200RPM drive or even one of the new 500GB 5400RPM drives. (I wonder if the MacBook Pro could be run off an external 10,000RPM SATA drive like the VelociRaptor. That’d be awesome!)

Removing the battery plate does not expose the memory bay like in the earlier MacBook Pros, so there’s more work to do.

There are 8 screws to remove from the bottom plate of the MacBook Pro. You’ll need a simple jeweler’s screwdriver. Remember the order of screws as there are three different sizes.

Here you can see the inside of the MacBook Pro exposed. It’s gorgeous. I was pretty impressed with the exterior design of the MacBook Pro, but this shows it’s true inner beauty.

This is where the RAM chips go. There are little tabs on each side of the chips. Pulling those tabs apart by less than a millimeter will “eject” the RAM for removal.

You put the new RAM in and take the old RAM out. You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about. (Gag, I know.)

Here you see the new RAM installed. Check out the logic board and fans. Everything is so compact, tight and compartmentalized.

Another inside shot.

Put the botom plate back on and put the screws back in. Tighten well, but not too much. You don’t want to strip the threads.

That’s it! It took less than 5 minutes for the whole operation. With 4GB RAM, boot time is marginally better, but the real benefit comes with running larger apps like Photoshop, Parallels, Final Cut, etc. I can have much more going at one time than I could before.

A side note: I also notice that the new MacBook Pro runs much cooler than the old versions. When running generic apps like Mail, Safari, Firefox, etc., the old MacBook Pro would usually keep at a warm 130°. When running Photoshop and/or Parallels for more than a few minutes on my previous MacBook Pro, the internal temp would rise to no less than 160° and would often top 185°. This new unibody MacBook Pro runs between 96° and 110° for normal apps and hasn’t risen above 130° even when running Final Cut. Very cool, indeed!
 

AKA: Yet another reason to love Apple, Inc.

After experiencing months of crippling trouble with the video card in my 2.4GHz MacBook Pro laptop (resulting in multiple logic board replacements, LCD screen replacements, etc.), I was generously given a replacement laptop from Apple. Yes, a full replacement. Stunning level of customer service and tech support – clearly above and beyond the norm.

Here’s the new machine. So nice! This new design and the new specs are so far advanced that I look back to my “old” MacBook Pro with a sense of analog nostalgia.

P.S. By way of Google, I found this image of the new logic board for the latest MacBook Pro. Pretty crazy shape!

P.P.S. The only bummer about getting a replacement computer from Apple is that one’s Apple Care warranty doesn’t follow to the new machine. I’ll have to buy another extended warranty asap. It’s a minor factor, but still – darn.

Here’s a desktop image for Chardonnay lovers! It’s 1920×1200 (for 24″ LCD screens) but it’ll scale down well to 1680×1050.