Category Archives: Mac Stuff

Installing OS X Leopard in 10 Minutes from a USB Flash Drive

Posted by JasonTomczak on August 15, 2009 1 comment

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.

Corsair "P128" 128GB SSD in a MacBook Pro

Posted by JasonTomczak on July 26, 2009 11 comments

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:

Action or Test Run   Seagate 500GB Corsair P128 Improvement
Startup to Desktop, Quicksilver & NewsFire   80 seconds 34 seconds 2.3x
Photoshop CS4   16 seconds 6 seconds 2.6x
Firefox 3.5   8 seconds 4 seconds 2.0x
Word/Excel 2008   11 seconds 4 seconds 2.7x
Mail   4 seconds 3 seconds 1.3x
Random Read (4k)   0.60 MB 16.19 MB 26.9x
Random Write (4k)   1.18 MB 12.30 MB 10.4x

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.

MacBook Pro and the Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200RPM Drive

Posted by JasonTomczak on June 7, 2009 58 comments

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.