&*Open Source Typical Mac User Live

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Welcome to the Typical Mac User Live show. My name is Victor Cajiao and I am your host this evening. My regular Podcast Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights.

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Talkcast ID: 3097 you will be asked top put in your talkcast ID and then you can put in the number you choose for your talkcast ID.

If it's the first Sunday in May it must be time for Mac Maintenance Sunday with my co-host Steve Stanger who is the host of the Mac Attack Podcast http://themacattack.us/. Steve is a super knowledgeable veteran Mac User alike, and tonight back up solutions.

External storage in general (or everything you wanted to know about external storage but were afraid to ask)

External Hard Drives - Interfaces:

• USB 2.0 - raw data rate of 480 megabits per second (40 times faster then USB 1.1 (12Mbps)) The effective data rate is between 40Mbps and 320Mbps depending on how many other devices are sharing the same USB bus.

• Firewire (A.K.A IEEE 1394 & iLink by Sony,) - FireWire was the replacement for SCSI (small computer system interface) due to the fact that "Firewire is easier to set up, costs less to implement and has a more adaptable cabling system" (source: wikipedia). Another thing FireWire has over SCSI is that it is hot swappable. If you disconnected a SCSI device from a computer before shutting it down, bad things would happen. (Mac old-timers remember SCSI conflicts? Yikes!)

• Firewire comes in a few different flavors 400, 800, and the new S800T

• FW400 can transfer data at 100, 200, and 400 Mbps. Data rate depends on the firewire device.

• FW800 - the FW 800 connectors are physically different from FW 400. FW 800 data rate about 786 Mbps. The full FW 800 specification support optical connections up to 100 meters and data rates of up to 3.2 Gbps.

• FW S800T - this specification is brand new, just published on JUNE 8, 2007. The specification allows for using RJ45 connectors and Category 5 cable. Anyone know what RJ45 and Cat 5 cable is? It's your standard ethernet connector and cabling. What this mean is that this new FW specification combines Ethernet and Firewire into a combined port. Sounds interesting but I haven't really seen it mentioned anywhere.

• eSATA - External SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) - It competes with FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 to provide fast data transfer speeds for external storage devices. In theory If you are using an SATA drive in an external hard drive enclosure FW 400 and USB 2.0 could cause data bottlenecks.

• Right now eSATA doesn't come standard on any Macs. So to use eSATA technology with your Mac you need to use some kind of controller card, so for current intel based Macs it's really only available to Mac Pro's (using a PCI Express card) and possibly on MacBook Pro's (using a an Express card in the MBPros Express card slot). I didn't research the availability of these cards...

Listener Mail regarding a problem: Steve and I got this email last night from listener Landya..

Victor and Steve:

 

I listen to your show and love it.  I have never had a serious problem with my new iMac until recently.  My problem deals with external hard drives, so i am hoping you can help me.

 

I have had problems with USB hard drives that have mounted successfully for some time on my iMac, all of a sudden failing to mount on my iMac.  First, I had a maxtor backup drive (that had my bootable SuperDuper backup clone on it).  At Time 1, I could boot from that drive.  (I tested it after making the clone.)  The drive was fine.  Then, at Time 2, it would not mount.  I tried taking it out of the hub and plugging it directly into the iMac, and it made no difference.  I thought it was my drive about to fail, so I bought a new drive -- this time a firewire drive.  I posted on the SuperDuper forum about which kind of drive to buy before purchasing.

 

Now, yesterday I had the exact same "fialure to mount" experience with a second USB drive (not the new firewire drive -- which still seems fine so far). At Time 1 it was fine and now it will not mount under any circumstances.

 

A knowledgeable Mac friend did some research for me.  He suggested it was related to a recent update to Tiger (the 10.4.10 update).  He suggested some sort of "archive and install " procedure that sounded scary to me.

 

I had a friend over last night who has a brand new MacBook.  I decided to test both of my harddrives to see if they would mount on her new MacBook.  Both mounted beautifully!!  And she has 10.4.10.

 

Must be something related to my iMac.  Can you guys help me?  Would be much, much appreciated.  From a big fan! 

Victor,

 

Some quick questions for your listener we can ask during the show - Are they LaCie USB drives???  Have you tried plugging the drives into all USB ports on your computer, including the two in the Mac keyboard?  Are the drives bus powered or AC powered.  Some USB bus powered drives have problems mounting even when connected directly to a Mac.  What makes this more frustrating is that sometimes the drives will mount and other times they don't.

 

Considering the drives mounted on her friends computer the next thing I would suggest doing it running through the Mac Maintenance routines on her iMac we have  discussed (i.e. repair permissions, clear all caches, including system and user caches, run system scripts, etc.) 

 

If that doesn't work the next thing I would suggest is downloading the Mac OS X 10.4.10 Combo Update v1.1 (Intel).I am assuming it's an intel iMac, if not download the PPC combo update.  Shut down the computer, disconnect all of your drives before rebooting, run the update - follow the directions.  Reboot and connect each drive again one at a time

 

Discuss - Self contained External drives vs building your own using off the shelf drives and enclosures.

• For me it all comes down to cost. If I can put the components together cheaper myself I will by the drive and the enclosure separately. But lately the price has been so competitive that I have been just buying self contained external drive right off the shelf.

Discuss - AC powered vs. bus powered (USB 2.0 and FW)

USB Thumb drives (A.K.A flash drives).

• Come in memory sizes of 32 MB up to 64 GB.

• Typical overall file transfer speeds are about 3 Mbps. The highest current overall file transfer speeds are about 10-30 Mbps. Thumb drives don't currently use the full 480 Mbps of USB 2.0 due to technical limitations inherent in NAND flash memory.

Hard Drive Arrays, what they are , what they do and why have one?

(for reference - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID)

• RAID (A.K.A. Redundant Array of Independent Drives, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (or Disks)) - RAID combines a number of physical hard drive into a single logical unit (shows up as one drive on the computer).

• There are a number of different data storage schemes or RAID Levels used to provide increased data reliability and/or increase performance.

• Without going into each level in detail there are three key concepts in RAID we can talk about:

• Mirroring - copying of data to more than one disk

• Striping - the splitting of data across more than one disk

• Error correction - redundant data is stored to allow problems to be detected and possibly fixed (A.K.A Fault tolerance)

• RAID is typically used on servers but can be used on workstations. The latter is especially true in storage-intensive computers such as those used for video and audio editing.

Non-RAID mutli hard drive system -

• NEW - Drobo (Robotic Storage Array) from Data Robotics, inc billed as "Your personal data robot" I haven't used it yet but all of the reviews I have seen really have given it very high marks as far as ease of use, ease of set-up, and reliability as far as data protection goes.

(http://www.drobo.com/)

The way it works

• You can use different size SATA drives, and the Drobo will format and manage the drives with no configuration needed form you. It combines the drives into a big pool of storage.

• If you install four 250 GB hard drives for example that doesn't give you 1 terabyte of storage as you might expect, but about 650 GB available for data, 233 GB are used for protection and the rest is reserved for expansion and overhead. (See drobo.com for the Drobo Capacity Calculator)

• It is data aware and handles redundancy of data incase of drive failure.

• When a new larger HD is installed the data is redistributed and redundancy is maintained. See the website for more info.

SHOW ENDING:

Well I want to thank Steve Stanger from the Mac Attack Podcast http://themacattack.us/ for being with ust tonight. You absolutely want to subscribe to his podcast and listen to each episode and some of the past ones. I sure do.

The Typical Mac User Podcast can be found at www.typicalmacuser.com and that shows is released weekly on Tuesday nights. This show will be release in my sream late tonight. If you haven't subscribed to that show yet, head over to the web site at www.typicalmacuser.com and hit the ONE BUTTON iTunes subscription.

For now this is your Host Victor Cajiao saying, enjoy the rest of your Sunday