Franz Kelsch on Tech

When the Apple iPad first came out, I was doubtful that it would be a success.  Certainly it could not replace a “real computer”.  Over time I have been proven wrong and iOS and the Apps continue to improve, it is become far more capable and can do many of the tasks previously only possible with a computer.

One example is blogging.  Doing this on the go, away for you computer was never that useful.  I have previously created blogs using on my iPhone using the WordPress App (free).  However there was no way to add photos and typing on an iPhone is not so easy.

The WordPress App, now with version 2.82 for the iPad and the iPhone allows you to add photos already on the device.  To get your photos onto the iPad is easy with the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit.

This kit comes with two similar devices, one to connect a USB cable and the other with a SD card slot. The USB adapter can be used to import photos from a camera connected via a USB cable, including an iPhone.  The other is to read directly a SD card from a camera.  Either you connect the camera via USB or insert the SD card then plug that device the iPad.  The iPad photo app automatically launches and allows you to import the photos from the SD card. Switching now to the WordPress App for the iPad, you can write your blog entry and  select the photo to insert into the text of the blog entry. Real simple.

The updated WordPress App for the iPhone also allows you to also insert images or video into the blog entry but only those taken with the iPhone.  The only other way to get a photo on your iPhone is syncing with a computer, but if you have a computer with you, you would just use it directly.

When Apple released the iPad last year I thought it would enjoy little success. I was completely wrong. Soon the iPad was selling widely and every person I talked to about their iPad had very positive feedback.

My wife really wanted to get an iPad but I decided we should wait for the second generation model, and I am glad I did. I went to the Apple store on launch day, March 11th, thinking a 2 hour wait in line would be sufficient. That was wrong because there must have been 500 people already in line, so I just left.   The next day I ordered it online and was given a 4 week delivery time.  I guess that was okay since I had never used one and was not sure how useful it would be anyway.  I decided to get the black model (it now comes in white and black) and with 64 Gb of memory, the most they offer.  I also opted for the WiFi only model since the plan is to use Anne’s iPhone4 as a hot spot when needed, avoiding yet another data plan that could only be used for the iPad.  I ordered the smart cover at the same time, which shipped right away.

I later decided to try to get one at the Apple store twelve days latter I tried again arriving 1 hour early, going to the back of a line of about 60 people.  I thought there would be no lines by now but again I was wrong.  Soon after I arrived, they were passing out tickets, starting at the front of the line. Only about one third got them.  I tried again two days latter.  Since it is a 25 mile drive from my home to the nearest Apple store,  I decided to arrive early enough this time.   Even though I arrived at 5:50 am, I was 10th in line.  Some had been there all night, in the cold and rain.  At least they had opened the doors to the mall so I was inside for my wait.  The line slowly grew over the next few hours and reached about 50 people by 8:20 when they started to pass out those “golden tickets” again.  I got a ticket this time as did about 20 people in line, which was less than half of those who had lined up.  This is TWO WEEKS after the product launch.

Some of those who did not became very angry, as if they were passing out food during a famine. One guy in particular was yelling at the Apple store employees.  I guess the iPad2 must be great to get angry over such a thing.  The ticket was only a guarantee that you would be able to buy one, but no guarantee of which model.  They opened the store at 9 am, an hour earlier than the regular schedule.  I waited another 10 minutes in line for the next sales person to help me.  “Do you have a 64 Gb, WiFi only, Black model in stock,” I asked.  They checked and found they could meet my request except only with a white model.  “That would be great”, I replied.  The fellow behind me in line had told me he wanted the 64 Gb, 3G model for AT&T.  He was being helped right after me and I heard them say they only had the 16 Gb, ATT version in stock or 32 Gb Verizion.  He wanted to buy two (the limit) and was disappointed and said he had to think about it.  So his 3 hour wait was in vain.

So what is my first impression of the iPad?  Having owned the original iPhone and later the 3Gs phone, as well as a iPhone4 for my wife, I already knew how to operate the iPad.  It was much easier to use than the iPhone and I soon discovered that iPad specific apps can be much better to use.  I am writing this entry on my iPad2, using the WordPress app.  I have done that also on the iPhone but usually only one or two sentences, never something this long.  Both my wife and myself are now using the iPad considerably, for things we used our MacBook Pros for in the past.  Maybe I should have bought two of them, like many people in line did.  I will write another blog post with more information about using the iPad2.

It was easier in the days of the big tower cases to just add in more hard drives, or replace an existing drive with a larger capacity on. But today with the ever increasing use of notebook computers, that is not so easy.  I have therefore become dependent on using external hard drives.  Being a Mac user currently, that means either a USB2 or a Firewire 800 interface.  Apple, once the leader in using Firewire, seems to have abandon it and no longer offers it on all their computers.  That leaves many to use the slow poke USB2 drives.  The new USB3 interface will be much faster, but few computers use it and no Apple products.  There is no telling when, or if, that will happen.

So I have been faced with the decision of either buying a USB2 drive, which are often heavily discounted in price, or buy a Firewire 800 drive at a premium price.  In both cases the internal hard drive is the same, the difference is just the interface.  To address this situation, Seagate has introduced their GoFlex drive series, in both portable 2.5 in and desk bound 3.5 in drives.  Each drive has a removable and interchangeable base that offers different interfaces.

Segate sells several different interfaces, including USB2, USB3, FireWire 800 and even Network Attached Storage (NAS).  I purchase a 2 Tb drive that came with a USB3 interface.  With the Black Friday sale, it cost me $89 at Best Buy.  I then added a Firewire 800/USB2 module for another $20.  Total price is $110, far cheaper than any 2 Tb Firewire drive I could buy.

In less than a minute I swapped the USB3 base for the FireWire 800/USB2 base, keeping the USB3 base in case Apple releases a computer with that interface.

The FireWire 800 base has two FW800 ports, which is important so I can daisy-chain this new drive with my other FireWire drives.  The only problem is that all the connectors are on the thin base unit, making cable management harder.  One FireWire connector is on the side and one on the back.  It just means you can not have the drive placed on your desk right next to something to it’s one side where the cable plugs in.

In only minutes I had inserted the drive into my Firewire chain and it showed up on my computer.  The drive comes formated as NTFS, but on it I could see a Mac program, which I ran.  It gave me the option to leave the drive as NTFS and install a driver to allow my Mac to not only read the NTFS partition, but also write to it, or, format as a Mac drive.  I chose the later.

The program then installed some additional Mac software, a nice touch for a world of drives that mostly have ignored the Mac.

Benchmarking

Without even the need to launch Disk Utlity, the drive was formated as a Mac format and showed up in the finder.  I then did some tests to see how fast it was.  The internel drive is only 5900 rpm, so I knew it would have some limits.

First I tested the drive using the USB2 interface and then repeated using the FireWire 800 interface.  This chart shows the results for a random write test.  The Green bars for USB2 were slower than the blue bars representing the FireWire interface.  The difference was not as much as I have seen with other drives.

I then did a comparison with this new GoFlex drive and a Western Digital 1 Tb drive that I bought with a FireWire 800 interface.  You can see from the chart below that the Western Digital drive (green columns) was significantly faster than the new Seagate GoFlex drive (blue columns).  Since both drives are using a FireWire 800 interface, it was surprising.  The difference must be a function of different drive rotation speeds and maybe the efficiency of the FireWire interface.

Conclusion

The Seagate GoFlex system is a great idea that could provide the option to update the interface of the drive as USB3 or other formats come along.  Even with the cost of buying the FireWire 800 module, it can be much cheaper than buying a dedicated FireWire 800 drive.  My experience is that FireWire drives are priced as niche products and not heavily discounted.

That said, the Seagate GoFlex drive was not as fast using the FireWire 800 interface as it should be.  When there is a need for the best speed you can get, such as video editing using an external drive, you might want to look elsewhere.

Previously I did some tests on various internal and external drives.  I just received a brand new Western Digital Passsport Studio drive.  This 500 Gb, 2.5 in, portable drive has three interfaces so I felt it would be a great way to test a comparision between USB2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800.  I used Drive Genius to do the benchmarking.  It tests four different parameters, but to keep it simple the following charts are only for Random Write.  The green bar is the tested drive and the blue is the standard for a MacBook Pro internal drive.

My tests confirm that the slowest is USB2, followed by Firewire 400.  The Firewire 800 drive was MUCH faster.  Look at the charts to get a feel of how big of a difference the interface makes.  I also include a chart from the prior log entry of the internal 7200 rpm drive.

USB2

USB2 Interface

Firewire 400

Firewire 400

Firewire 800

Firewire 800

Internal 7200 rpm drive

I was lucky to get a new 500 Gb portable hard drive for Christmas.  It was one of the Western Digital Passport series, a very small USB drive.  I already had 4 of these, 2 with 160 Gb, 1 at 250 Gb and 1 at 320 Gb.  One might think it all adds up to a lot of giga-bytes, but with hard drives, the larger capacity are much more useful than multiple drives that add up to that capacity.

Also laying on my desk are 3 different 2.5 in bare drives that have been removed from various notebook computers, 1 at 160 Gb, and 2 at 100 Gb.  I have an external dock I can plug these into, but what do I use them for?  They are too small to hold an image of my current Mac Book Pro hard drive.  It becomes a bother to split backups over multiple drives.  So they just kind of sit there, like paper weights.

I also have a 3.5 in, 500 GB bare drive sitting next to them.  It failed awhile ago.  It is still under warranty so I need to send it back to Maxtor to get a replacement, but I have not got around to it.  I guess I just have drives coming out the Ying Yang.

My new minimum sizes:

2.5 in drive – 500 Gb
3.5 in drive – 1 Tb

In a prior blog entry I discussed swapping the internal drive on my MacBook Pro and how it’s performance improved.  I decided to run the same benchmark on several different external drives I have.  To keep the comparision simple, I will show graphs for only one parameter, random write.  I used Drive Genius 2 to do the benchmarking.

Internal Drive

First to repeat my internal drive performance.

Western Digital, 2.5 in, 7200 rpm, 16 mb cache, SATA II

Segate 500 Gb in my own FW 800 case

This provides the overall best performance (green bars).  The blue bars are the stock Macbook Pro hard drive.

Now for the external hard drives, listed with the best performer first.

Firewire 800 Connection

SIIG External Firewire 800 case where I installed my own Segate, 500 Gb, PATA drive

Next is Maxtor One Touch III, 500 Gb, with a Firewire 800 interface.  Note that I have had issues using these drives on a Mac and ended up tearing apart a 750 Gb since the interface no longer worked.

The my latest purchase, a Western Digital Studio Editon, 1 Tb drive, with Firewire 800.

USB 2.0 Connection

Segate 750 Gb, SATA II, 7200 rpm drive inserted in a Thermalake USB 2.0 dock.

And finally a Western Digital, 250 Gb, Passport, 2.5 in. 5400 rpm drive.

When I get a eSATA card for my computer I can do some further testing.  Many of my drives also support Firewire 400 so I could test that, but this is enough for now.

My conclusion is that Firewire 800 is a very good interface for an external drive, much faster than USB 2.0.  The difference is far more significant than one would expect considering the theoretical difference in transfer rate is 800 vs. 480.  For 3.5 in drives on FW800, the random write was more like 4 times faster than when using USB, at least in the dock I have.

I just finished replacing the hard drive in my Mac Book Pro.  Unlike most notebook computers, this was not an easy task.  I had to remove 25 screws, remove the keyboard and disconnect two ribbon cables from the mother board before I could remove the old hard drive.  Fortunately there are many good tutorials on the web to follow. I used a video tutorial at Other World Computing.

My model came two years ago with a 160 Gb drive.  It was just plain out of space, especially after taking all the photos in Europe recently.  Although I find the Mac must better in terms of applications using disk space, the documents, music and photos all add up.

I decided to go with a 7200 rpm drive, instead of the traditional 5400 rpm.  That meant I would only get a 320 Gb drive, instead of 500 Gb.  I bought the Western Digital drive online at newegg.com for $99, plus tax. Shipping was free.  I arrived late in the day.

I put the new drive in my external hard drive dock.  This is a cool device that holds either a 3.5 or 2.5 bare SATA hard drive.  I ran SuperDuper to clone the existing drive to the new drive so once installed it would boot right up.  Since this external doc is only USB 2, it took awhile, 5 hours in fact.  It was now 11 pm and I was wonder if I should start this project.  Of course I could not resist.

I put a piece of paper on the desk and wrote down where all the screws were coming from and place the screws there as I removed them.  When I finally was removing the keyboard, the ribbon cable came disconnected before I could look underneath to see where it was attached, which gave me a bit of a startle. But I finally figured it out.

After the old drive was removed and the new on installed, and all the screws put back, I turned the computer on.  It seemed to not start and I was now worried.  But I guess it was just trying to figure out what to boot from since it had a new hard drive and shortly it started up.

I am very happy with the performance.  It seems to be a much faster computing experience.  The increase in performace could be from the faster hear drive, the larger hard drive with high density or the fact that I have much more free disk space.  In any case I am glad I went with a faster hard drive.  Only by testing a 5400 rpm 500 Gb drive compared with what I installed would one really know the best solution.

I did some benchmarking of the new drive compared with the what the database for the MacBook Pro.  The graphs below show how the new drive (in green) compare with what the baseline was for a MacBook Pro.  I included graphs for both random read and random write.  It seems the 7200 rpm does make a significant difference.  Click the graphs to view enlarged.

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Read

Internal 320 Gb 7200 RPM - Random Write

Just looking at the specifications, my new internal 7200 rpm drive takes no more power, has any more vibration or a higher noise level, compared with the Western Digital 5200 rpm drive.