This User’s ExperienceThe blog of Matt Henderson

REPLACING MY MACBOOK’S HARD DRIVE WITH A SOLID-STATE DRIVE (SSD) has proven to be the most dramatic computer upgrade I’ve ever made. The startup time — including the operating system and my startup applications — has gone from 2.5 minutes, to under 30 seconds. In terms of the Macintosh experience, everything is so much faster, that it feels like having gone from a Motorola 68040-based machine, to an multi-core Intel-based machine, skipping the PowerPC altogether (maybe even better than that!)

Although platter-based drives have steadily grown in both speed and capacity over the years, the next major leap forward was promised by SSDs. These drives are based on solid-state memory, similar to your USB pen drive or the SD card in your camera. With no moving parts, they promised both dramatic speed increases, and dramatic improvements in reliability for certain contexts (like usage in laptop computers.)

The first SSDs that appeared on the market, however, proved disappointing. They were at the same time slower than the drives they were intended to replace, and they were prohibitively expensive. After reading those early reports, I lost interest in SSDs.

That is, until I read this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

Based on Jeff Atwood’s experience, things have definitely improved, and so I placed an order for a 256GB SSD from Crucial. Arriving yesterday, I mirrored my startup drive to the new SSD (using SuperDuper!) and then swapped it into the machine.

For some reason, it took about the same amount of time to go from switching the computer on, to seeing the login screen. But after that point, the experience was simply amazing.

Here are some notes:

1. As mentioned before, the startup time (after logging in) dropped from 2.5 minutes, to less than 30 seconds. Whereas I used to patiently watch several startup application icons bouncing around together in the Dock for minutes, all the applications now seem to launch instantly.

2. Using the “AJA System Test” benchmark tool, the SSD gets read/write speeds of 220 and 190 MB/s, respectively, compared to 40 and 50 MB/s as measured on the previous drive.

3. Whereas I used to see 40 or 50 frames per second when encoding a video (from and to the same drive), I’m now seeing 130.

The overall experience of using the computer is just amazing. Applications start instantly, there’s minimum perceptible delay in switching applications, and applications which depend heavily on disk caching (like Safari and Firefox) feel an order of magnitude faster.

Unfortunately, Google Voice doesn’t yet support forwarding to international numbers, which, for someone like me, living in Spain but with considerable interests in the US, is quite a bummer. (What I particularly like about Google Voice is its call screening facilities.)

To work around this limitation, I have Google Voice forwarding to my US SkypeIn number.

This works well when I’m at the computer, as I can answer my Google Voice calls directly in Skype. But what about when I’m not at the computer?

One of Skype’s preferences is forwarding, and I have it configured to forward unanswered calls to my iPhone. While this works fairly well, a parameter I’m still fiddling with is the time after which Skype considers the call “unanswered” and does its forwarding.

If you set this value too small (like “1 second”), then you don’t have enough time to answer Skype calls when at the computer. If you set it too large (like “10 seconds”), then your Google Voice call will timeout and get dropped long before Skype has time to forward to the iPhone.

Presently I have this value set at “4 seconds”, which seems to be a good trade-off.

In case you missed it, TechCrunch received some 300+ confidential documents related to Twitter (the company), which were attained by a hacker. These documents contained minutes of meetings, business plans, talks with companies like Google and Microsoft. In short, a disaster for Twitter.

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I recently placed an order for a camera with Pixmania.es. After a few days I received this email (with my order number edited; so don’t click the link):

Su pedido 9HJ1-6706EDIT fue envíado.
Visitahttp://www.expansys.es/tracking.aspx?EDITpara más información. Según el transportista elegido, y para tener más información: – contactar directamente con DHL al 902122424 o 915867927 – contactar directamente con SEUR al 972 242 526
Order Processing
eXpansys
+34 933 938 182
mailto:orderstat@expansys.es
http://www.expansys.es

In such a short email, Pixmania have failed on five points:

1. The email is from Expansys.es, which as far as I can tell, is a completely different company. Presumably they’ve merged or something? This is akin to placing an order with Best Buy, and getting a fulfillment email from Amazon. My first thought was, “Oh no, did I somehow order this thing twice!?!” A short explanation to the customer could prevent a lot of confusion.

2. The only information available in the tracking link, is a note to say that the product shipped and that they’ve sent me this email.

3. And this is uniquely amazing: The text beginning with “Según el transportista elegido…” means this: “Depending on the courier company we choose, please call either DHL or SEUR to get more information about the status of your order.” Yes, you read that correctly. They either don’t know which courier they’ve chosen, or just don’t want to tell me.

4. Without a tracking number, I’m not going to get very far calling either DHL or SEUR. Both this email and the Expansys website only display the Expansys order number.

5. Finally, when calling the “Order Processing” telephone number +34 933 938 182, I’m told that “This telephone number is unavailable.”

You would think that somebody at Pixmania (or Expansys?) responsible for user experience would have, just once, placed an order at their own site, and observed what happens.

This article is written for the benefit of other Mac OS X users that may find themselves in the unfortunate situation of needing to update the firmware on a Seagate 1.5TB drive.

Considering the purchase of a 1.5TB Seagate drive for my Mac Pro, I was aware of the widespread freeze-up problems people had started reporting several months ago. I was also aware that the problems were resolved with a firmware update released by Seagate, and assumed that if I bought one today (from Newegg) it’d arrive already up-to-date. You know what they say about assuming things.

Upon installing the drive in the Mac Pro, the first thing I noticed was that Disk Utility would time-out whenever I tried initialize it. I observed other weirdness, like strange permission problems, and the Finder not allowing the drive to be unmounted.

I went to the support area of the Seagate site, and found an article relevant to these particular problems. I used the serial- and model-checker tool on that page to confirm that, indeed, my drive was affected by the problems, and needed a firmware update. (Heavy sigh…)

I downloaded the update, and naturally found no instructions for how to apply it using a Mac OS X system. Amazingly, Google couldn’t help much either. (I did learn, though, that it’s important to download the firmware update directly from Seagate, and not Newegg, as there’s a variety of different firmware updates available, depending on your drive’s specific serial number.)

In a nutshell, I stumbled along, but found performing the update to be a simple and straightforward process. The following procedure is from memory, but should be sufficiently complete:

1. The firmware update you download from Seagate is a .ISO disk image. Use Disk Utilities to burn this image to a CD-ROM. (And leave the CD-ROM in the computer.)

2. Write down your drive’s serial number, as you’ll need this later to identify which drive the update is going to be applied to. (You can find the serial number of the drive using the the Mac’s System Profiler application, accessible from “About that Mac”.)

3. Boot your Mac from this CD-ROM by starting the computer with the [option] key held down, and choosing “Windows” from the list of displayed options. (I know, I protested at the thought too.)

4. Your computer will boot in what looks like an old DOS or UNIX mode. (I would have taken a picture of this, for kicks, if it’d occurred to me.)

5. You’ll initially be shown the firmware update “README” file, which to Mac users will appear quite cryptic and foreign. Look for the option to escape this screen. (Escape or Exit or something like that.) I ignored the README’s advice about disconnecting all drives except the one on which I want to apply the update, and this proved fine.

6. You’ll next be presented with a screen from which you can perform the firmware update. I selected the “Scan Drives” option, and was shown a list of drives on which the update can be applied. In my case, this was three. The drives are identified by nothing more than their serial numbers. (But you have that handy, of course, since you diligently followed step 2.)

7. Select “Download firmware update” for the drive you want to update. (“Download” in the DOS/UNIX world means “Update” to the rest of us.)

8. If all goes well, and you don’t happen to have a power outage while the update is happening (not a small risk in Spain, I can assure you), then you’ll be presented with the ominous-sounding message, “You must power cycle the computer to complete the update! Do NOT use CTL-ALT-DEL!”. (“Power cycle” in the DOS/UNIX world means “turn it off and back on” to the rest of us. And ignore the CTL-ALT-DEL bit; as a Mac user, you’ve been spared the need for that.)

   Just about the time you finish reading that message, a “Press any key to continue…” message will appear and confuse you, especially when you press a key, and your computer suddenly turns off. That, my friend, is power cycling.

9. At this point, you should be able to restart your computer, with a fresh new firmware version running on your Seagate drive. After this point, I’ve had no further issues with my Seagate drive.