It’s Dark and There’s No Marsala
It’s friday night, and we took the boy to Young Chef’s Academy. $30 gets three hours of cooking for him and time for a nice dinner out for BRK and the wife-unit.
That is, until Mrs BRK says she has a 6:00pm sales appointment and can’t go to dinner yet. So we’re at her office, in a back room, with the lights out, and no chicken-stuffed pasta in marsala sauce. Do we deserve better than this? D@mn right we do.
Well, we did kinda forget her birthday, so perhaps this is karma getting a running start and kicking us square in the pants.
Fine. We’re even now, karma.
Podcast this weekend? YOU BET! And we’re already stuffed with questions, no need to advertise for more.
But do you want to participate in our non-commercial commercial? Grab your computer, a copy of Audacity, and an external microphone, and then record, in a very paniced voice, “ZOMG I NEEDZ A MOTORCYCLE!”
Variations can include,
“GREAT GALLOPING RHINOS AND GORILLAS I GOTS TO GET ME A MOTORCYCLE!”
“MOTORCYCLEZ BRK! I GOTTA HAVE IT!”
“I’m 89 years old and no young WIPPERSNAPPER is gonna separate THIS grandma from her motorcycle! GIMME!”
Etc. You get the idea.
No long intros or deviations from the theme, motorcycle. Speak quickly and concisely. Use an external microphone and get your face right up to it. Ladies, this means you; we can’t use your recording if we can’t hear you. C’mon people, really freak out and do it with some Ooomph.
Two other things:
“Dear BRK, ducking of background sound track much better in [podcast] episodes 3 and 4. Linghu.”
Our number one, big bad mombo-jombo issue with Garageband is getting the track-levels set properly. We’re trying really hard.
If you’ve got comments or technical expertise about Garageband you want to volunteer, please do send us an email. We cannot possibly respond to everything, as we get 100-200 emails per day, but we read everything.
Technical Question for you storage-geeks our there: We either want to get a Firewire 800 external hard drive or upgrade our iMac’s internal SATA drive. Opinions?
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Fun read again. Really enjoying the podcasts too
On the extra/replace drive issue, You could upgrade the internal drive, but you still need something to backup too first.
I would advise Time Machine for that, since you restore using a option from the install DVD.
External drive is nice to split files a bit.
Often/daily used files on the internal drive, the rest on the firewire drive.
The email address is also my MSN address if you want to talk about it.
Keep up the fun
Re: The HDD – go the external any day. Splurge a bit more than you really need to and get a unit that does RAID-1 – like the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II hard drives. a 2TB Studio Ed II (using RAID-0) can be configured as a 1TB RAID-1 drive and your precious, precious data is protected against hardware failure (but not, unfortunately, against issues that originate between the keyboard and the chair)
Then, when you get your next new computer, there’s no ripping hard drives out, you just unplug and plug in and you’re up and running.
Oh, and you can also use it for Time Machine. HIGHLY recommended.
Internal > External. Every day, every time.
External, preferably 2 drives with RAID mirroring.
Believe me, you only need to have to call a client once about why you’re going to be late with a project to make you wish for a RAID setup.
To that end, I run a pair of G-Tech G-Drive Q 1TB drives under a Software RAID 1. It’s a good back-up solution, but it is NOT streaming video friendly. This is a back-up solution only, since the computer has to control the RAID, and it’s not striping data, but duplicating.
I’ll be honest, I never bothered upgrading the HD in my iMac, I just bought more external drives.
If you have USB 2.0, I’d get a USB TB external. They’re really cheap and faster at the top end than any Firewire external. Also, USB is much more prevalent than firewire on other computers, so using your drive to transport data to another computer is much easier with USB.
Other than that, I would recommend against getting an internal if you’re going to have to do away with you’re current one. Copying all your data to the new disk is pointlessly annoying.
In summary, if you have an extra 3.5 inch internal drive bay, go with an internal, else, get a USB external if you have USB 2.0, else, get a firewire external.
You can get some really damned nice external raid setups. As far as speed is concerned, internal is faster hands down, BUT you lose so much potential. I run a 5TB NAS and love it. Sure it is slow, but gigabit + the capability to take it wherever I need makes it so much more versatile and appealing. Either route you take, make sure you at least RAID 1. If you need links for acceptable equipment you can hit up my mail or just newegg fu your way to a good NAS setup.
external any day. and there should be a usb 2.0 port on your mac. but its good to use that firewire port they have provided as well. just that it wont be as fast as the usb 2.0 one.
Damn! that’s alot of email!!
USB external for size, convenience, and portability.
Being able to walk around with a couple of hundred gigabytes of whatever is a surprisingly liberating feeling.
Internal? *cast Aspect of RuNuts?!* From what I gathered from your drooling iMac post, you have the new macdaddy 24″ iMac. Pulling the glass from the front of the iMac flat panel requires some serious Goblin Suction Cups and a bit of finesse. Not to mention a lint-free clean room and a boat load of glass cleaner. I would cringe if I saw a finger print every time my Shattered Sun Pendant of Might proc’d. With that said, I’d go external Firewire all the way. USB2 is for whining Pallys! Read some facts, USB2 doesn’t match Firewire 400 or 800 speeds.
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html
http://lowendmac.com/macdan/05/1007.html
“Bandwidth Reality
Although USB 2.0 at 480 Mbps sounds faster than FireWire at 400 Mbps, in reality no device on a USB chain can use more than two-thirds of the bandwidth. That means that USB 2.0 throughput tops out at 320 Mbps – 20% slower than FireWire 400. Apple was late in adopting USB 2.0, rightly seeing it as a competitor to FireWire. Eventually they saw that the entire industry had adopted it, and they’ve been including it on Macs for the past year or so. Bare Feats tested USB 2.0 drives against FireWire in May 2004 and found that sustained read and write speeds with USB 2.0 drives were only about half that of the same drives on a FireWire 400 bus on Apple’s hardware. (The same report showed FireWire 800 up to 50% faster than 400. It also mentions that USB 2.0 is faster on Windows PCs, where it rivals FireWire 400 for throughput. TechTV did a thorough comparison on Windows PCs and found that FireWire 400 outperformed USB 2.0 by 15-70% depending on the test.)”
Drobo External (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822240001)+ Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337)x 2-4 = WIN…..imo!
Granted you have to purchase the Drobo from the manufacture and not Newegg itself, kinda sux. In the end it’s worth it. Watch the video on Drobo.com.
Drobo is compatable with Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b-2002), which works out very well in your case.
The type of hard drive you want really depends on your needs. There are a few reasons you might upgrade your internal drive – like having a semi-portable iMac with more storage, or if your internal drive has failed. But I assume with such a new iMac that your internal drive is working fine, and that you don’t travel around with the whole computer. So, IMHO an external is the easiest and most flexible solution.
Plus, replacing the internal drive of any recent iMac is a pretty difficult job (if PC repair is not your specialty). They aren’t meant to be user-upgradable and opening up the case to remove the hard drive may even void your warranty.
USB2 externals will be the cheapest. But even if it comes cheap any name-brand (Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor) should be reliable for a few years at least. Just remember that ALL hard drives, as mechanical devices, will fail eventually. Backing up a hard drive is essential, if you don’t want to someday live through ‘losing your digital life in a puff of grinding discs’. Lots of folks have mentioned various RAID setups for backing up. These drives will cost your more (they generally have two or more separate drives in one case) but are guaranteed to keep your data backed up. Of course *any* drive can be used as part of a RAID array – in fact you can use Disk Utility on the Mac to set this up.
But RAID setups are generally for server grade machines. You can easily just plug in a cheap USB2 external drive, and use Time Machine to back up your internal drives data to the external. Assuming your original intent is to back up the data on your internal drive that is. If your intent is just to increase your storage space, then by all means buy a large external drive with RAID built in. No matter what kind of drive you get, if you want to make sure everything is backed up a good rule of thumb is to take the amount of Gigabyte’s you want to have for your files, then double that amount. That’s the amount of drive space you’ll need to back everything up.
Also, as USB2 is the cheapest, it’s also the slowest. Though USB2 is marginally faster on paper than Firewire, everything I have read says that in real world tests Firewire is equal to or even faster than USB2 – at least on a Mac. And if you’re talking about Firewire 800, it will be much faster than USB2. Again though, the need for speed depends on what you’ll use the drive for. A drive used just for backup will be fine with USB2 speeds. If your recording and editing video or multi-track audio to the drive, Firewire 800 is what you want.
Dealmac(DOT)com tracks lowest prices on tons of Mac-related stuff, including hard drives. I use the site constantly.
Happy Hunting! (of hard drives of course)
Please, please, please, a million pleases… include a table of contents for your podcast.
free advice from Italy here.
External, FireWire, 800 is good, but 400 is fine.
External Storage is going really cheap, consider to buy a couple. One for archive and one for back-up.
If your internal HD is 250GB, get a 250 more and a 500GB for back-up. Or more of course.
The Lacie 500 by Neil Poulton has a good value. The fw version. My fav is the 2 disk-raid 2Big by Lacie.
Bol, MM Hunter from Milano
http://www.atworkgroup.net
you forgot mrs brk’s birthday?…… damn karma will definatly catch up on that one. no sauce for you.
So, I’m too lazy to actually install an audio recording device for your motorcycle sound bite needs. But in an effort to help where I can, I offer you the greatest Vent trick in my arsenal. I’ve been using it for years, and now it might actually serve a purpose. Plug the following sentence into a Ventrilo text-to-speech binding and see if you wanna use it for your non-commercial commercial. Enjoy! (Love the blog, btw)
Vent text string: My motorcycle goes rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Hopefully you can see the full string in your admin panel, as the site layout cuts off the end of it. In an effort to keep my favorite vent trick on the DL, this message will now self-destruct. Have a nice day!
-Vargos, Area 52
Both. External first, so you can back up everything. That’s the main point of an external drive: Backup that survives a crash of the internal drive. Then get a bigger internal SATA drive. 500 gigs will run you about $65 right now (I always shop at geeks.com, YMMV).