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!

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.

After becoming accustomed to upgrading to newer MacBook Pro models every year, I finally convinced myself that I’d try hanging onto the same 2.16GHz laptop for a little longer, even if it was out of warranty and a whole 240MHz slower than the latest-greatest. I already had 4GB RAM installed, so I figured it’d be best to just upgrade the hard drive. Granted, the 160GB 5,400RPM stock hard drive I was using had more than 60GB free, so I wasn’t exactly aching for storage, but bigger is always better, right? I found a great 200GB 7,200RPM SATA drive on newegg.com for only $139 after $30 rebate, so I bought it.

I cloned my 160GB drive to the 200GB drive. Unfortunately, it took nearly 4 hours thanks to the 80GB of data running over a USB 2.0 connection. USB 2.0 sucks. Really.

Once the cloning was done, I got my handy-dandy Torx screwdriver set out and began disassembling the MacBook Pro. I used the awesome (but somewhat outdated) instructions from iFixit.com.

MacBook Pro, ready to go. Note the awesome Dr. Bodelin’s Laptop Bumpers that keep the MBP raised up a little for heat dissipation. I have a set for each of my laptops, my wife’s laptop, etc. You should, too.

Beginning surgery:

Removing screws from the body of the MacBook Pro is simple.

I found that placing the screws along side the iFixit instructions made things easier on me. So many screws, but so little to worry about.

Lifting the top off the MacBook Pro is easy… kind of. The rear, left and right pry loose with almost no effort, but the front was a real pain in the butt. There are some little plastic tabs that are hooked just under the lip of the front bezel. They just don’t want to let go. After a leap (or tug) of faith, I wrestled the entire top of the laptop off.

Pretty stuff under the hood:

Old drive with heat sensor:

Old drive and new:

200GB drive snugly in place in the MacBook Pro:

Putting the MacBook Pro back together was dirt simple. It took no more than 4 minutes and everything looks as good as it did before the whole upgrade process.

- – - – - -

The Good
After replacing the hard drive, I’ve got nearly 120GB free space. Wow. I noticed that moving data to and from my FireWire 800 backup drive is much, much faster. A 10GB transfer used to take 6-8 minutes, and now it rips through in less than 4 minutes. Parallels seems to open and run faster, too.

I’ve noticed almost no increase in heat with this new drive, and it’s actually quieter than the 160GB drive that came with the MacBook Pro. Hooray!

The Bad
With a 7,200RPM drive, I was expecting a serious decrease in boot time. I saw a significant increase – like 15-20 seconds slower. Converting AVI files to MP4 (for AppleTV) went from 5 mins 20 seconds to 6 mins 40 seconds. Time to open big RAW images in Photoshop remained the same. A bit of a disappointment.

The Ugly
During the cloning process, something must have gone awry, because the Leopard video drivers got seriously messed up. The colors on the MBP screen looked washed out and my 24″ LCD screen, which was previously gorgeous at 1920×1200, was now rendered dull brown-ish green in color and wouldn’t display anything above 1440×900. I re-installed the video card firmware update that Apple released in late February, but that didn’t fix it.

I ran a full battery of cleanups with Leopard’s Disk Utility and OnyX. Neither made any notable improvement.

After several fruitless calls to Apple Genius bars, I decided to wipe the drive clean and see how things would go. The fresh install of Leopard fixed the video problem, but it didn’t seem to make any difference with the speed I was hoping to see in the 7,200RPM drive.

Even with 4GB RAM and a fresh OS X installation, the apps I use most often seem to move at the same (or slower) pace with this new drive. Bogus.

Final Verdict
While I’m happy with the extra hard drive space, I am pretty disappointed with the fact that I’m not seeing any real-world, “holy crap!” increase in speed. Aside from the kick-ass transfer rates with my external backup drives, the 200GB 7,200RPM upgrade seems to have been a bit ho-hum.

Update on New Upgrade:

After using the 200GB 7,200RPM drive for a couple months, I swapped it out for a 320GB 5,400RPM drive made by Western Digital. Check out the installation process for photos, notes, etc. Comparing this modded 2.16GHz MacBook Pro to my newer 2.4GHz MBP, they’re really running about even.

These same display problems eventually plagued my 2.4GHz MBP and I had to have Apple replace the logic board. Thankfully, that fixed it – and it was free. – Jason

After writing a glowing review of Apple’s AirPort Extreme (glowing review well deserved), I received a few emails from folks inquiring about using the AirPort Extreme to stream their iTunes music libraries. I posted some images and information about this – the most significant bit of data being the average 33KB/s (264kbps) bandwidth used for streaming audio.


A couple days ago, I got another email from an observant Mac user (Chris W) who was experiencing some trouble playing video files from his USB hard drive attached to AirPort Extreme base station. Video playback was jerky and sound intermittently cut out.


I tested the same scenario – using the AirPort Extreme to stream video to my MacBook Pro. This is essentially the identical task of the upcoming AppleTV.


Although the AppleTV may employ secret magic or buffering tech that I am not aware of, streaming video between the AirPort Disk and a wireless computer should give a close approximation of how the AppleTV streaming would perform. The AppleTV also sync’s video, photos and audio with up to 5 wireless computers so content can be viewed without the need for streaming. Of course, with a tiny 40GB hard drive, the AppleTV may quickly fill up, requiring all additional content to stream.


There are essentially two popular/likely protocols that will be used between the AppleTV, the AirPort Extreme and a home user’s computer. 802.11b/g is the most common protocol due to the scarce number of people in early 2007 who are actively using the next-gen 802.11n.


With the AirPort Extreme, 802.11b/g data transfer rates, as explained in an earlier review, average about 1.7MB/s (13,926kbps), with an occasional average of 3.4MB/s (27,852kbps) depending on site conditions. 802.11n rates were much better – 6.2MB/s (50,790kbps).


As demonstrated in the two screen captures below (thanks to iShowU) the bandwidth required to stream video is much greater than streaming audio. Again, audio averaged 33KB/s, whereas video averages anywhere from 100KB/s to 400KB/s (800-3,200kbps). In separate tests with AVI files, I’ve seen the transfer rates ranging between 500KB/s and 1.2MB/s (4,000kbps-9,830kbps).


The two clips below are both 40 second clips that start out at the exact same point in the video. Due to inadequate streaming and buffering in 802.11b/g mode, the video stalls repeatedly, thus causing the 40 second end-mark to fall on a different scene.


AirPort Extreme video 802.11b/g – herky jerky

AirPort Extreme video 802.11n – silky smooth




Again, it looks like video streaming takes anywhere from 3 to 35 times as much bandwidth as streaming audio depending on the size of the video file, the file type (h.264 vs. avi vs. mov, etc.). I’ve taken a couple stills to show the bit rates of tested movies. They are:


Movie Purchased via iTunes




Legal Backup of Owned DVD




While discussing this issue with one of my uber-geek friends, he suggested that the bit rate of the backed-up DVD may be higher than that of iTunes movies and that iTunes movies would probably play better via 802.11b/g. The images above show that the iTunes movie has a higher bit rate.


The 802.11b/g protocol on the AirPort Extreme just can’t seem to handle video smoothly without supplemental buffering or caching. 802.11n, however, plays video flawlessly. It’s really just as good as if it was being played directly from an internal hard drive or from a DVD.


Of course, I’m not part of Apple’s R&D team so I can’t confirm if this video playback issue has anything to do with why the AppleTV was delayed. If anything, it’s something that Apple should be aware of. Knowing Apple, they probably are aware of it and I’d bet good money that they’ve got a fix for it – maybe a nice big fat buffer built into the AppleTV – enough to prevent Irritable Buffer Syndrome. What a pain in the butt that could be.


Some folks out there may say I’m way off the mark. I don’t know. They could be right. The current speculation is that Apple has delayed the AppleTV as a marketing ploy. Which seems more logical? While I could be wrong, it seems better to delay the launch while figuring out how to improve streaming & caching issues than to release a product that could potentially become an embarrassment.


Either that, or it really is just a tricky marketing ploy.

NB: The screen captures used above were used with a legally backed-up copy of one of my favorite home-library DVDs, The Professional, starring Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, Natalie Portman and Danny Aiello.