Just upgraded my macbook pro with a newly-available 500GB 2.5″ SATA 7200 RPM drive. It was simple and quick and now I have more, fast space on my internal hard drive.
Here are the steps:
- Purchase the drive - I got mine from macsales.com otherwise known as Other World Computing.
- Attach the new drive as an external drive in an external chassis. Fortunately I already had one, but OWC also sells those. Something like this would do the trick. (Note that Firewire is faster than USB but that both would work.)
- Use Disk Utility (it comes with Mac OS) to format the new drive. I chose partition-> 1 partition, Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), then pushed the “options” button and chose “GUID Partition Table” as this is an Intel-based Macbook.
- Use Disk Utility to copy the internal drive to the new external drive via the “Restore” option along the top of the main window. This step took ~2 hours using FW400, copying about 200GB of content from the old disk to the new.
- Halt the system, remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new drive. Fortunately on the new MacBook Pros, this is easy. The old systems were challenging to get into and to change disks in. Although again OWC has the directions.
- Boot the new system and revel in its speed and free space!
Posted in: Apple.
Upgraded the memory on my Mac Pro from 5GB to 12GB and I feel like I’ve been let out of jail. Now I can have Entourage, Firefox, Aperture, and Vmware running at the same time and not be swapping to disk - life is much faster. I used 2 X 4GB kits from Other World Computing - a great company. Removed the 2 X 512MB DIMMs that were the original memory in the box.
Posted in: Uncategorized.
Tagged: Mac Pro memory upgrade
The Sun 7000 is a new NAS storage line from Sun. It contains lots of new ideas, and some of those new ideas can be a bit confusing. My colleague Jesse St. Laurent has taken the lead on clearing up the confusion by writing the Sun 7000 FAQ. Have a look at it and feel free to add questions (or answers) via the form at the bottom of the page.
Posted in: Sun.
I’ll be teaching two days of my Solaris tutorials at the Usenix ATC conference in San Diego during the week of June 15th. Hope to see you there!
Posted in: Solaris.
My April 2009 column has been published in ;login: Magazine. This month it’s The Sun Virtualization Guide- making sense of and decisions about the various Sun virtualization options. LDOMs, Containers, Domains and Xen are all options worth considering, and this guide leads you through what each does and when to use them. Some ;login: contents is freely available at ;login:, but my column this month is not one of them. I’ve posted the .pdf here for those without a USENIX membership (although I strongly recommend you get one if you are interested in all things Unix).
Posted in: Audio, Corporate Technologies, Uncategorized.
Registration for the 2009 Usenix ATC conference has just opened. The conference is top notch, for and buy Unix administrators. It’s in San Diego, CA the week of June 15th. I’ll be teaching two tutorials there (covering Solaris 10 administration, virtualization, file systems, and security) and hopefully will be around for the whole conference. One of the keynote speakers is David Brin, and I’d love to meet him.
Full information, schedule, and information is here. Hope to see you there.
Posted in: resources.
Thanks to Becoming a Computer Technician for picking my blog as something useful to Mac users. I guess that means I should update my “Best Mac Resources” page - it’s sorely in need of one.
Posted in: Apple.
We’ve rescheduled the sixth NEOSUG meeting for March 11. Dave Miner will talk about the state of OpenSolaris and demo some new functionality, and I’ll talk about what’s new in the Solaris 10 update 6 (11/08) release. Hope to see you there. For full details and registration info have look at the NEOSUG discussion forum.
Posted in: Solaris, Sun.
Very happy to see the fruits of the labor of Nicholas Solter, Gerald Jelinek, and David Miner - The OpenSolaris Bible. Just received my copies (I was Technical Editor) of the book, and it is the best way to learn OpenSolaris. It focuses on the user experience, but also has lots of good how-to detail about administration. Note that they are offering some free chapter downloads (check out the right-hand column) as well. Check it out at Amazon.
Posted in: Solaris, Sun.
Checking out a band from my alma mater. MGMT sounds pretty good. A bit of Talking Heads in there I think. Not as good as listening to the new David Sanborn “here & gone” album though, which sounds great on my sound system, which I don’t think I’ve documented. I haven’t heard a home system that sounds better…
Source: iTunes on a mac, songs ripped from CD via apple lossless format (or bought in highest resolution available - usually 256-bit from emusic.com, Amazon, or iTunes). I buy CDs when possible for maximum resolution but sometimes get lazy. With my entire library available from a server I can load songs into my ipod or iphone, listen to them via the mac mini attached to my home theater in the living room, and so on.
Connection: USB out to a little USB converter box - Hagerman HagUSB - this outputs SPDIF
DAC - LITE DAC-60 - vacuum tube-based digital to analog converter takes the SPDIF and sends it to my integrated amplifier. The whole chain is digital until the vacuum tubes do the conversion and add a bit of sweetness and smoothness to the sound.
Integrated Amplifier: PS Audio GCC-250. Pure, clean amplification power. Just back from repairs so I’m happy.
Speakers: Acoustic Zen Adagio
Subwoofer: the AZ sound terrific but I needed a little more low-end bass so I added the MWF-15 subwoofer from AV123.
I use a variety of cables for interconnecting, some also from Acoustic Zen.
With this setup I can listen to any artist, album, or playlist built from the CDs I’ve ripped from my collection (almost all of them). Of course the setup is a bit expensive, and I had to rip all the CDs. They now sit on a ZFS-based file system with RAID protection (don’t want to have to re-rip) and I have a copy stored off site (really don’t want to re-rip!). Total space taken up by my itunes library - a little over 1TB!
Obsessive? Over the top? You make the call. But it’s very convenient, and sounds great. And check out the Sanborn disc if you want to check out how your system sounds (and listen to some great jazz). Do the horn players sound like they are in the room with you?!
Posted in: Audio, Music.
Tagged: Music
