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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Small portable Firewire drive?

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Karel Bata

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Just for carrying a ghost image of my MBP's OS. Seems a waste to dedicate a whole G-Tech drive, and have to carry that around, when it may never even be used!

Do any such FW800 external drives even exist? Maybe an SSD would be good...
 
Wow. Aren't they nice! Cheers!

But hold on - a 5400 drive with a FW800 connection? I thought hard drive speeds were the bottlenecks, and if you wanted FW800 speeds you'd need a really fast HD. Or am I wrong? :blink: Looking at the spec of that drive I see they claim "Transfer Rates: Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)" Is that more or less than 800mbps? Looks like a lot more. But that wouldn't be intermittent read/write, would it?

Anyone able to clarify this?
 
the benefits of a 5400 rpm hard drive are they they run cooler, more quiet, and eat up less power. But if your moving around large files with a lot of continuous write, you'll see a hit in speed. If you are looking just to keep it as a backup you might just be better off getting the 5400 rpm of it's just to keep a ghost of your OS and save a few bucks, unless loading that OS back up to a new hd in ur mcpro as fast as humanly possible is more important, than you should go SSD.
 
But then the bottleneck becomes the write speed of the HD in the MBP, so an SSD doesn't really gain anything.

But, in an emergency, booting from an external drive will work won't it? In theory It's back up in two minutes? Can't find the OWC drives here, but the G-Tech mini has two FW800 ports

g-technology_gdm4250_med.jpg


and is on discount at Amazon UK! I think I'll grab one!
 
Don't all these drives have the same HDD inside though? It's just the packaging and controller that different (methinks?) They are built for laptops, so I would expect them to be more rugged than the larger counterparts.

What do the military or police have in their laptops?
 
I have some MilSpec touchscreens/tablets , they either have 5400rpm Seagate/Hitachi drives, or SSD's. Generally HDD in the vehicle mounts and SSD's in the handheld ones.
 
I second the OWC/macsales hard drive. They have some of the best customer service I have ever experienced.

I ordered the 120 gb SSD drive thinking it was a kit with the SSD drive and the enclosure seperatly. My plan was to put the SSD in a mac mini server and then put the server drive in the enclosure. I ordered it at 8:30pm EST and paid 18$ for overnight shipping and received it the following day. I think they will ship up till 8:30 CST!!!



When I got the drive it was all together as an external enclosure. I was just gonna open it up and take out the SSD when I saw the warranty void if case is opened sticker and didn't want to void the 3yr warranty on the $320 SSD drive. So I called them up expecting to have to send the drive back and told them that I wanted to put the SSD in my computer and put another drive in the enclosure. They said that it was fine and they put a note on my account so that if I ever had problems with the drive I could send it back and the warranty would still be good.

From the fast late shipping to getting a real person that understood what I wanted to do and them being flexible to meet my needs I was very impressed.

The enclosure is very nice as well. This is what I bought.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQMSSD120/

I haven't put in the SSD yet but once I do I will let you know what I think. All of the ratings and reviews are very good though.
 
I was concerned about that but the OWC SSDs have a much better consistent speed over the life of the drive than other SSDs:

http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-BeforeAfter-OWC.html

Now that review is for the "RE" version which is more expensive and has 28% over provisioning and the one I bought only has 7% but that's better than none.

I also plan on using the SSD for the boot drive so it's not having a bunch of large files getting written to it once it is setup.
 
You've been doing your homework then. But are you sure the boot files aren't modified as you go along? I'm on a PC running XP at the mo, but it can't be that different, and looking inside the System32 folder and sorting by date... yields a few surprises. Some are indeed changed, but they look like updates since first install. But most seem unchanged, and there's even one Pcdlib32.dll that's not been modified since 1995 (that would be a Win 95 file! What's that doing there?). So your logic seems sound. Of course you'll have some overhead on top of what the OS needs?

Might do that myself. As I say, do the test again in a month. ;)

p.s. Curiosity made me google that file - seems it's a Kodak PhotoCD file. Remember those?
 
Yeah I will definitely do the test again down the road. I am sure somethings get written and rewritten on the boot drive but from my understanding (and I could be totally wrong) where you run into problems is the constant moving, writing, and erasing of large files. So if I was using it for video files I could see it slowing down much faster. But who know I guess I will find out in a few months.

The whole project is kinda an experiment. I am building a lightweight (in terms of processing power) mobile DIT station in a pelican case with a mac mini server, monitor, ups, and other goodies. It's mainly for us to just dump cards off onto but also may do some processing. And yes I know I can do it with just a laptop but not one that is a mac under $2000 with a 21 inch ips monitor, SSD drives, 8 gigs of ram and all that fun stuff.

Plus why go small when you can go big and with a pelican case :sifone:
 
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