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LaCie 2big, 4big Quadra drives hop the USB 3.0 bandwagon, give Macs 12TB of speedy storage
LaCie has been sprucing up its smaller drives to handle a new crop of Macs that support USB 3.0. It's now turn for the big boys to play. Updated versions of the 2big Quadra and 4big Quadra (not yet shown here) use the faster port to reach the potential of their high-capacity RAID arrays, peaking at either 210MB/s for the dual-drive 2big and 245MB/s for its quad-drive cousin. We're not seeing a fundamental shakeup of the design apart from the higher speeds, although that's not necessarily a problem given the FireWire 800 to catch legacy users and hot-swappable bays for future upgrades. Video editors and other storage mavens should just prepare themselves to pony up. The upgraded Quadra models will start at respective $499 (4TB) and $1,099 (8TB) prices when they ship in October, and they're only poised to get more expensive when LaCie sets the costs for the higher-end 6TB and 12TB models.
Video: Shouting at disk drive causes high latency, low morale
Here's a tip for everyone who hasn't made the jump to solid state: try to be nice to your disk drive. Brendan Gregg from Sun's Fishworks team wanted to see the effects of vibrations on his disk array, so he proceeded to shout at it. On video. Yeah, we bet that's pretty embarrassing for the drive in question, and what results is a sharp spike the number of I/O operations that take over 5ms to complete. Moral of the story? Yelling at your computer isn't going to make it run any faster. How about next time we see how it reacts to Ozzy, Mozart and warm, gentle nuzzles? We've placed video of Gregg's sadistic hardware taunts after the break.[Via Slashdot]
My USB dilemma, can you help?
Here's my daily dilemma. Between work and family, we own 6 iPods (this includes our two iPhones), each of which has its unique playlists, podcast subscriptions and so forth. We also have a printer and scanner -- both used regularly, and an EyeTV tuner, again critical. We have an external microphone connector for Skyping and no fewer than three external disks. One is used for Time Machine, one for EyeTV recordings, one for my G4 backups. My G4, with its ten built-in USB ports and connection to a single powered USB 4-port hub, is on the fast-past to dying. It's not right on the edge yet but all the signs are there. It's time to move on. But what is going to replace that G4 with its surfeit of USB ports?
Put a stop to pesky hidden files with BlueHarvest
Do you see all sorts of ".ds_store" and "._" files lying around on your external drive when you plug it into a Windows machine? Like this MacOSXHints reader, did you browse your company's network with your Mac, leaving a trail of ._ds_store and .Trash files in your wake? If you're nodding your head right now, I think I've found the solution for you: BlueHarvest, a preference pane that lets you manage and easily clean up these various kinds of Mac OS X-specific hidden files.BlueHarvest allows you to specify where these hidden files are created, offering different drive categories (startup disk, Servers, non-HFS disks, etc.) and allowing you to specify volumes and folders to leave alone. It even has a slick preference tab for drag and drop cleaning of .DS_Store files and resource forks from disks and directories.I've been playing with this for a couple days now and I have to say: it's pretty handy. I have a little flash drive I use for school and a SonyEricsson phone that I can mount on my Mac, both of which I can *finally* say are truly devoid of pesky hidden files. BlueHarvest works on 10.3.9 and 10.4.x, offers a 30 day trial and costs a mere $10 - small price to pay to regain your hidden file sanity.
