Category Archives: Opinion

Booting OS X on a 32GB USB Flash Drive

Posted by JasonTomczak on April 28, 2008 1 comment

After testing the OCZ 32GB USB 2.0 flash drive for backing up some servers (and being disappointed), I thought I’d try to use it as a bootable drive for OS X trouble shooting. Here’s a quick overview of how things went.

Formatting the 32GB OCZ Flash Drive for booting into OS X. In this example, I split the drive into an OS X partition and a Windows-friendly data-swap partition.

 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy a fresh image of OS X to the bootable partition on the 32GB drive.

 

The cloning took hours and hours. Painfully slow. This speed (or lack thereof) is consistent with the speeds I experienced with data transfers on my Windows servers.

 

Booting to an external drive is easy – just hold down the “option” key when starting your Intel-based Mac. When the available drives appear (internal, USB or FireWire), select the one you want to boot from and hit Enter.

 

It took over 5 minutes to boot OS X from the OCZ flash drive. Ouch! For sake of comparison, it takes about 25-30 seconds to boot from the internal SATA drive, and roughly 45 seconds to boot from a 5400 RPM SATA drive in an external USB enclosure like the Thermaltake BlacX. 5 minutes is rather crappy, but the cool thing is that it actually works.

 

As you can see in this image, the MacBook Pro is running OS X via the OCZ 32GB flash drive.

 

The 32GB drive certainly “works” as a bootable drive, but its performance leaves so very much to be desired. Five minutes for boot time is really unacceptable (6-7 times slower than external SATA drives), although I’ll admit that USB flash drives still have a lot of room for improvement.

Despite the aggravating 5 minute boot, it was fun to see OS X successfully boot. On a faster USB flash drive, I’m sure the boot time could easily be reduced by 50% or more.

32GB Flash Drive by OCZ

Posted by JasonTomczak on April 27, 2008 1 comment

I recently purchased an OCZ USB 2.0 32GB shock-resistant, water proof flash drive from newegg.com for backing up critical files from several dual- and quad-core Dell servers. The drive was about $150 (now $179.99 and out of stock) – a little high for 32GB, but the convenience of having all that data on a keychain was simply too hard to resist.

When I used the drive for the first time, I was expecting some pretty impressive transfer speeds. OCZ, the drive manufacturer, indicates that the 32GB drive uses dual-channel tech to speed things up. In theory, it sounds great. In practice… not so much.

The first major chunk of data transferred was a 4GB folder with about 800 files. From the point of drag-and-drop to the moment the data transfer completed, the 32GB drive took just under 490 seconds, or roughly 8 mins and 8-10 seconds.

I thought this was a bit odd, so I made the same backup with a 500GB SATA drive using a Thermaltake BlacX USB 2.0 drive bay. The same transfer took about 128 seconds, or 2 mins 8 seconds.

I then repeated the backup with an old beater 8GB flash drive from Corsair. The same 4GB folder transferred in about 230 seconds, or 3 mins 50 seconds.


In this nerdy chart, shorter bars are better. Stats are in seconds.

I got slightly better results moving larger individual files, like 500MB and 1GB video files. No major change when formatted and used on my MacBook Pro.

As for data storage, the OCZ 32GB drive is hard to beat. 29.86GB formatted, this thing will fit TONS of data. I could back up critical files from all my servers with this little drive. I could easily move my entire iTunes library off my MacBook Pro’s hard drive and free up many, many gigs of space. I can have my Win 2000, XP and Ubuntu OSes boot via Parallels from this drive. But because the throughput of the OCZ 32GB flash drive is nowhere near as fast as I was expecting, I’ll have to shelf my dreams of speedy keychain backups of my servers.

Dell – Good Customer Service, Bad Corporate Waste

Posted by JasonTomczak on March 23, 2008 6 comments

This is a brief commentary on corporate waste. Last summer, I bought a Dell laser printer. After moving my office, I accidentally damaged the installation CD. I checked the Dell Support website for a downloadable version of the CD, or at least the same network installation app on the CD. That critical app is/was not available online – only partial drivers and patches for older operating systems could be found on Dell’s site. I called support to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. The support rep acknowledged that the network installation app and full set of drivers were not available online and that I would need to request a replacement CD. I was told the CD was free, so I put in my request.

The next morning, the CD was delivered to my door. It was sent overnight. From a service point of view, this was fantastic. I was expecting a week or so, but never 18 hours.

After the surprise and delight wore off, I got to thinking about the situation. The box was huge. A laptop would have easily fit in it. It also weighed a lot – much more than cardboard and a CD.

I opened the box and found a huge amount of wadding taking up 80% or more of the empty space inside. Below the wadding was a thick, heavy user manual for the laser printer, and shrink wrapped with the thick tome was my slim little CD.

Barring the fact that the CD should be downloadable in its entirety from the Dell website (costing Dell nothing), I thought the following:

I didn’t need or want a massive user manual. (Who would?!) The CD could have been sent to me in a smaller envelope, like a standard FedEx envelope or even a bubble-style envelope. It could have been sent 2-3 day air, or even by USPS media mail for about $0.60.

The expense involved in this sort of frivolous and wasteful shipping practice is staggering when you consider the number of similar occurrences that likely happen on a day to day basis. Even if there were only 20,000 such “lost or damaged CD” requests per year (roughly 50 per day worldwide), the overnight shipping, the cost of the superfluous user manual (printing and raw materials, not to mention deforestation), the oversized and wasteful cardboard box, and all the paper/foam padding.

At 20,000 estimated occurrences per year (arguably a low estimate), the cost could reach $400,000 or more. Nearly half a million dollars to send out replacement CDs.

Had Dell put a policy in place to not ship user manuals with each CD (ask the customer if he/she wants it – 99% would not) and use thinner, more efficient packaging and shipping methods, costs could be cut by 70% to 80% – easily.

Or, add the stinking CD to the support site for download – or make it a download-by-request email link. Cost = $0.

Another thought – the carbon footprint for sending out unwanted user manuals and other materials overnight is h-u-g-e. That big, fat, poisonous and lumbering carbon footprint could easily be reduced to near zero by Dell if they’d just pay a little attention to where they’ve got wasteful practices.