EMC have announced that they have released version 8.1.148 of Retrospect, which supports using PowerPC based computers as the backup server.
Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category
EMC Releases Retrospect 8.1.148 with PPC support
Monday, June 29th, 2009Apple planning US$1 Billion iDataCenter
Thursday, May 28th, 2009According to DataCenterKnowledge apparently Apple is planning on spending some of its billion dollar cash on hand to build a US$1 billion data center on the East Coast, either in North Carolina or Virginia (as they battle to legislate the best incentive packages).
With thanks to David for the link.
Western Digital 500Gb 2.5inch Scorpio Blue’s are hot!
Monday, April 6th, 2009I bought a 500Gb 2.5 inch Western Digital Scorpio Blue with the intent on sticking it in my MacBook Pro. To give it a a bit of a test run first I put it into a “G2 Mini Combo – USB 2.0/FireWire 400/800″ external case from Zytech.
Formatted it with lots of Zeroes, copied the MBP’s contents onto it. And noticed that by this stage it was literally too hot to touch.
Checking out the data sheets shows that it’s maximum operating temperature is 60 degrees C. It requires 2.5W for read/write, 0.85W at idle, 0.25W at Standby and 0.1W in sleep. I’m guessing that the drive currently inside the MBP is a Fujitsu MHY2200bh drive with 1.9W read/write, 0.6W at idle, and 0.13W in Standby and Sleep. Maximum temperature is 55 degrees C.
Unfortunately the SMART utilities like smartmontools don’t seem to let me grab drive temperature information when it’s in an external FireWire case. So I’d have to install it in order to find out more about it…
So the question is, will installing the drive inside the MBP fry the machine or the drive? Will the fan run continuously? Will the machine be way too hot to put on your lap? Or will I be forced to use the drive externally? (I know of one person who’s had the same drive installed in their MBP, but haven’t had any adverse affects)
I note that the largest BTO drive Apple offers in MacBooks is 320Gb. Is that because they’re the only drive to run cool enough?
Using HFS+ disk quotas
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Check out this page at securecomputing.net if you need to enable disk quotas on HFS+ volumes.
HFSDebug 4.0 released
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008The ultimate Mac OS X hacker, Amit Singh (last I heard, snapped up by Google) has released a new version of his HFSDebug tool (that’s a commandline tool folks 
.
The new version has more features to do with hard links and hard link chains, new filters, component-wise path lookup from scratch, and is now Snow Leopard compatible (even if it is still only a PPC binary running under Rosetta
via MWJ
MacBook Air SSD drive comparison
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008The folks over at StorageMojo have a battery life comparison of MacBook Airs with hard drives and SSD drives. Also a comparison of MacBook Pros with and without SSD drives.
Anybody with a MacBook Air with SSD care to comment if they’ve got a /.hotfiles.btree file on their machine? This would possibly indicate that Mac OS X is still shuffling around their file system to optimise file access as if it was on a hard drive.
Apple Drops SSD MacBook Air premium to AU$769
Friday, July 4th, 2008ZDNet Australia reports that Apple Australia have reduced the premium on putting a solid-state drive into a new MacBook Air to only AU$769, almost halved from the previous AU$1409.
