The Need for Speed (Part 3)...

In the continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible....

Checkout my previous blog posts Need for Speed... and Need for Speed (Part 2)... for some background.

Real World SSD Speed Comparisons
As promised, I did some very unscientific timings of my MacBook Pro (2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM, but the generation before the sealed battery) with both the supplied SATA 320GB drive and the 256GB SSD drive.

Just to remind you, I've installed a 256GB SSD (Solid State Drive) to replace my standard drive. The timings were done on the MacBook Pro with my standard account and applications setup. To install the SSD drive, I replaced the SATA drive, formatted the SSD drive and then did a fresh install of Snow Leopard on the SSD. I then used the migration assistant to copy my user account and applications across from the original drive to the new SSD. This should mean that the timings are comparable.

Before letting you in on the timings, I'd just say that my Voyager Q Interface has been a tremendous boon, allowing my to swap drives around for backups, test installs, creating a SL boot drive - marvellous. I used it in this instance to mount the original 2.5" SATA drive via Firewire to copy across my setup to the SSD. A really great bit of kit!

OK, so on to the timings!

First, the operation of the MacBook Pro

Sleep and Wake don't look that different but just look at the boot from cold to login panel result! Almost a minute quicker. The login panel to last icon bounce result was also hugely impressive although I'm not sure if all is as it seems. I have several applications loading on boot and for some reason, LittleSnapper seems to take an age to load on the standard drive.

OK, let's look at some application loading.

As I say, pretty unscientific, the number of bounces for the SSD is the number taken for the application to be loaded and the screen drawn. Obviously, in the case of Mail, it takes longer for the mail to be updated but we're just looking at application loading times here. Interestingly, with the eSata drive, on Mail and iTunes, the applications hadn't been drawn on the screen even when the icon had stopped bouncing, taking a few seconds more in each case.

It's really hard to visualise what these speed increases mean without actually trying it out, but I think you'll agree, there are some pretty significant improvements to be had if you're fortunate enough to have the spare cash for an SSD card. I've no doubt that the cost will drop dramatically over the next few years.

I wonder if the fabled iPad or Apple tablet could be fitted with an SSD drive as standard. Well we know that Snow Leopard has been slimmed down for a reason, it's just the price premium that's the blocker I would imagine. But a 10" tablet with Snow Leopard and a 64GB SSD....

Now the next project to try out is the 10,000RPM hard drive for the Mac Pro as mentioned in a previous post. I have to admit though, I'm wondering if the improvements on the Mac Pro would be as dramatic using an SSD.

I'll have to think about that!

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The Need for Speed (Part 2)...

In the continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible....

Checkout my previous blog post Need for Speed... for some background.

Thinking about SSD (Solid State Drives)

I blame Leo Laporte!

Well, he was the one that put me on to SSD drives in the first place. I knew Leo had replaced his supplied SATA drive in his MacBook Pro with a 128GB Corsair SSD (Solid State Drive) a couple of months ago, and was extolling its virtues on the MacMania trip.

I'd sort of considered it, but the limitations of 128GB and the rather high price had dissuaded me.

No, I thought I'd wait until Snow Leopard appeared and see what speed improvements that would bring. I was still searching for the Holy Grail, for computing nirvana, a place where my computer would boot in the flash of an eye, where applications would spring into life virtually instantaneously, a place where the damn thing would keep up with me and not waste precious seconds, hesitantly opening windows a few seconds after I'd instructed them to open.

Now the new release of Snow Leopard took me closer to that place, but by not much. Don't get me wrong, it's still faster, but not an order of magnitude faster.

Then by coincidence, I listened to MacBreak Weekly earlier in the week and Leo mentioned his SSD drive again, this time being used in conjunction with a bracket to install a second drive to replace the SuperDrive. I was intrigued and thought it time to do some more research.

There were SSD drives on Amazon but they were either from companies I'd never heard of, were too small (64GB - please!) or much too expensive. However, a quick Google turned up a rather surprising result....

SSD drives, available in the UK, from Crucial - the memory people. I never knew Crucial did SSDs? I have to admit, that did give me a huge amount of confidence.

Now to see if a drive was available for my model of MacBookPro, what capacity and what price?

I have a 15" MacBook Pro with 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4GB RAM. As usual, Crucial have some great guides to zero right into your make and model of laptop. Lo and behold, they do three SSDs:

64GB for £116
128GB for £221
256GB for £399

All plus VAT by the way!

My current SATA drive is a 320GB drive and I was running with about 150GB used including the full Final Cut Studio application and the usual assortment of applications. You can see where this is going can't you!

Now the 256GB SSD is quite a stretch and pretty expensive but it's a legitimate business expense and besides, I need to stay at the cutting edge don't I. So after talking myself into it, I stumped up the credit card and ordered the little beastie.

Its a 256GB Crucial M225 2.5" Solid-State Drive (Part Number CT1018301) and arrived today. Click on the image for more info.

My plan was to remove the existing drive from the MacBook Pro, replace it with the SSD, format the SSD and install a fresh install of Snow Leopard on to it. Then, use migration assistant to copy my applications and user account across from the original drive.

This all went according to plan, except for the fact I forgot to install the QuickTime 7 the first time round. However, it wasn't too much of a chore as it installed a complete Snow Leopard installation in 9 minute and 44 seconds from a Snow Leopard image via a Firewire connected drive.

Let me just say that again, it installed a full Snow Leopard build in 9 minutes and 44 seconds!

This thing is fast, blisteringly fast!

Now in my haste to install the SSD and try it out, I didn't take any benchmarks of the Apple supplied SATA disk. However, the removal of the disk is so trivial, I'll replace the supplied drive over the weekend and post some real life comparisons between the standard configuration with Snow Leopard, and the SSD with Snow Leopard.

So have I reached computing nirvana?

You'd better believe it....OK, so it doesn't instantaneously boot, but it flies!

Applications open in the blink of an eye, it's breathtaking. Just one example, open Safari and the application window is drawn before the icon has a chance to do a single bounce!

I'll spend a bit more time over the weekend and report back with those comparisons, I think you'll be impressed.

For now, it's time for bed. That's quite enough excitement for one day.

To get the next update in the continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible.... Need for Speed (Part 3)...

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New Plex Plugin...

If you're a regular follower of ScreenCastsOnline you may remember I covered a fantastic free application called Plex, back in episode SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex This is an amazing application that turns your Mac into a media center and whilst optimised for large screen viewing, is just as great to run on your desktop or laptop. I've adopted Plex as the main application for my Mac mini media center.

The application supports a plugin architecture and when I did the original show, I put some feelers out via Twitter to see if anyone could help me put together a plugin for ScreenCastsOnline. To my surprise, I received back an email from James Clarke, one of the Plex developers who kindly offered to write the plugin for me.

Result!

Of course, the plugin was intended for the free and open shows available on the free feeds, but it was a terrific boon and quite a delight to see ScreenCastsOnline in there with the rest of the plugins.

I checked with James how easy it would be to develop a plugin for the members shows, baring in mind, these are protected and require a username and password to authenticate to access the content. He said he'd have a think about it and set about testing some possible approaches.

To cut a long story short, James has now delivered a version of the Plex plugin that supports both the free feed and the members feed. He's written a super front end to allow valid ScreenCastsOnline Extra members to sign in via Plex and stream the shows. The plugin accesses the standard RSS feeds so it will present a separate list of shows for each year, and will be updated each week when I publish a new show.

Wonderful!

He even took it further by adding in a option to toggle either HD or ED versions of the show to help out members with limited bandwidth. I know a lot of members have adopted Plex following the original ScreenCastsOnline show and this new option will be greatly appreciated.

I'm sure James won't mind me extending one more time, a huge thank you for all his efforts and I truly appreciate his patience and tenacity in bringing this to fruition.

If you're an existing Plex user, you can either install or upgrade the updated plugin from the Plex App store. This weeks members show contains a small screencast on installing and configuring the plugin.

If you've not checked out Plex, I can't recommend it highly enough - check out the free ScreenCastsOnline show SCO0201 - Mac mini Media Center - Part 2 - Plex

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The Need for Speed...

Well by now you probably have a good feel for the the general consensus around Snow Leopard. Pretty rock solid release with some unfortunate incompatibilities with some software, although these are falling off pretty rapidly. The other big win for most people is speed with nearly all of the reports I've seen (via Twitter at least) experiencing a much snappier performance from their Mac.

I've now upgraded my main production Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro.

Both seem snappier and I've had relatively few problems. I did have some early problems with the Mac Pro following a kernel panic after the install after which the machine came back up with Snow Leopard installed but was a bit "flakey". A couple of apps kept crashing on me. A re-install of Snow Leopard seems to have fixed that.

Now the Mac Pro is one of the pre-Nahalem Mac Pros with 16GB RAM, so it's no slouch.

However, I noticed a tweet from my good buddy Victor Cajiao (@victorcajiao) from the Typical Mac user podcast who was rebuilding his Mac Pro with a new 10,000RPM system disk.

Hmm....

The drive Victor had chosen was the Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB - a bit of a speed monster. It transpires that he's been running his Mac Pro with another 10,000 RPM drive and loves it.

One of the main bottlenecks in modern machines is the speed of I/O from the hard disk. This impacts everything from Boot times, to application loading, to swap file performance and may other aspects of the perceived and actual performance of the machine. I'd never thought to upgrade the system disk in this way though - d'oh!

A quick google showed I could get the exact same disk from eBuyer over here is the UK for £160 plus VAT - ouch! Baring in mind, this is only a 300GB drive and you can pick up a 1TB drive for less than £50 but the price premium is for the speed, the quietness/coolness and build quality. Plus it comes with a 5 year warranty.

The 300GB is no big deal as it will only be used as the system drive for the OS and applications - plenty of room! All my data is stored either in the cloud via DropBox or on a RAID 0 array on the same machine (3 x 1TB) backed up of course by my Drobo.

OK, so I went for it!

I really need to do a clean install on the Mac Pro (actually, I probably don't) to clear off some of the older applications and have a pristine installation of Final Cut Studio. So when the new disk arrives, I'll remove the existing system drive and keep it safe, and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard and re-install my critical apps.

So that should see a significant boost on the performance of the Mac Pro!

Which leads me to the MacBook Pro.....

....but that's a different story for next time!

To follow my continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible, checkout the next related blog post Need for Speed (Part 2)...

Click to read more ...

Double take...

With all the talk about the Apple event on the 9th September and the re-launch of the Beatles catalogue and the new Beatles Rock Band game on the same day, rumours of an Apple tie up and The Beatles are rife.

I just read the following in the next weeks Radio Times, a UK based TV listings magazine, which has an article about a documentary featuring the Beatles called "The Beatles on Record". The article features the director of the documentary, Bob Smeaton, who also directed the Anthology series in 1995. The article brings his work up to date by stating:

He was brought in by Apple more recently to create mini-documentaries for the digitally remastered studio albums, which are being released on the 9th September.

I nearly fell off my chair!

Could this be confirmation of additional content being created for the Apple "Cocktail" project?

Then it dawned on me, the article probably refers to Apple the record company.

Or do they still exist?

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