Jason Tomczak

Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB - Great for MacBook Pro

After having upgraded my older, out-of-warranty MacBook Pro to a 200GB, 7200RPM hard drive a few months ago, I spotted a great item on sale at Costco. It was the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB external 2.5″ hard drive. The regular price was $170, and I got it for $140. As soon as I got it home, I took it apart so I could put it to proper use - inside my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro.

Here are some pics showing the process of taking the WD Passport Elite drive apart.

Here’s the prey in its natural habitat:

A credit card or thick fingernail is the best tool for prying the wide edge open. There are quite a few notches - very tough, very resistant to force. Careful, or *snap*, the case will break!

You can see the notches that hold the case together.

Because the case wants to snap back together, it’s necessary to hold it apart from all angles. I used four credit/gift cards to do the trick.

Here’s the center frame extruded from the outer case.

All the parts…

As you can see, the drive inside is a Western Digital 320GB SATA drive with a 5400RPM rotational speed. These drives sell for $130 to $170 online, and for much, much more in retail stores.

Here you can see the SATA drive separated from the tiny little SATA-USB controller. This controller works fine on its own. You can use it with or without the WD enclosure.

BONUS PICS:
I dropped the 320GB drive into my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro. It formats to 298.09GB. So far, I’ve got 219GB free. Wow.

Close-up inside the MacBook Pro…

Another close-up inside the MacBook Pro. I like the paper-thin SATA interface.

FINAL WORDS:
What I like about the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB is that it’s a great hard drive for laptop use. It’s much cheaper than a generic OEM drive. The outer case is flat-out awesome - better than most 2.5″ cases you can buy online for $50 or more. An additional perk - the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB case is 100% bus-powered. No need for an external power supply or dual-USB cable setup to power the drive. I’m very happy with this purchase.

Caveat: moving from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive can result in a slow-down here and there, but I’ve found that this 320GB drive is pretty swift on its feet so far. Boot time is only 3-4 seconds slower, Photoshop runs roughly the same and only video conversion seems significantly affected (by about 20%). All else is good.

Tags: 320GB, MacBook Pro, My Passport Elite, Western Digital

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So Dumb, It (mega)Hurts

Found on Craigslist this last week. Ouch.

Tags: iMac

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Parallels - Unparalleled Customer Appreciation

Back in January 2008, I wrote about a great customer service experience with Parallels. Out of the blue, they sent me a $10 Visa gift card as a thank you for buying Parallels 3.0.

This afternoon I opened my mailbox to find an envelope from Parallels. When I opened it, I found another surprise - a $10 iTunes gift card. That’s $20 in customer appreciation on a $79 purchase from 2007.

This seems rather unprecedented, doesn’t it? I like this trend!

Tags: Customer Service, Mac, Parallels

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Dandelion Desktop Image

I took this photo at the top of a high-elevation vineyard using my Rebel XTi and a Canon 100mm macro lens.

Download and enjoy. The full-sized image is 1920×1200 and will easily scale down to 1680×1050.

Tags: dandelion, Desktop Images

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Booting OS X on a 32GB USB Flash Drive

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.

Tags: Mac, OCZ 32GB USB Flash Drive, OS X

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