My schedule is completely thrown off. I spent Saturday in Saugatuck, MI with friends raislak, zarniwhooper and husband, asta77, and my wife. We had wine, burgers, and fun, and then arrived back at home around 5:30ish.
Side note; all those friend links are to livejournal. Can’t just follow the trend, pauld, can you?
Not being big day-trippers, Teeny and I were quite tired when we got back. So we decided to take a nap. I woke up at 1:30 am, Sunday. Oh my. Hence, this strange ramble.
So I replaced 4 (four) hard drives on Friday night. Oh, the carnage! I now have a Western Digital 30 GB, IBM Deskstar 120 GB (the actual dead drive), and two Maxtor 100 GB SATA’s on the floor of my office, with a very happy Western Digital 500 GB SATA drive in my old Mac. By the way, this Mac is a dual G4, 500MHz each, and is over 8 years old. With 1.5 GB of RAM, however, she still cranks out blogger posts all like snip-snap. So why mess with a good thing?
Unfortunately, this may be the final stop for this machine. It is currently running Leopard, via the very tricky Install Via Target Disk Mode from a PowerPC Mac Mini. But because I now only have the Serial ATA drive available (using the Sonnet Tempo card), I don’t have Target Disk Mode available to me. In fact, to get this install up and going, I used the fabulous Carbon Copy Cloner, and the power of prayer, to see my old Deskstar’s contents onto the new drive.
I haven’t seen a lock-up now in 36 hours (yay!), but I am now in NIOTM, Nothing Important On This Machine, mode. If for whatever reason this machine is no longer bootable, and I have some key piece of not-backed-up data, I’m 100% screwed. So, nothing goes on this machine that is absolutely vital to my day-to-day. Fortunately, when, not if, I forget this rule, I’ve got Time Machine and a 1TB Time Capsule to save myself.
That said, the machine is running very smoothly after all the hullabaloo. Also, my power bill should be a slightly happier sight, because a) I shut down my computer for a significant chunk of time (days!) and b) I’ve replaced four (4) spinning hard drives with a single HD. In addition, that single HD is a WD “GreenPower” drive, which means that it spins down on its own to 5400 RPM when I’m not using major disk I/O, and spins up to 7200 when needed. How much power does that save? WD says 40%. I’m sure that’s not accurate, but I know I’m saving power by not having the other three drives, so I feel a bit less like an ecological disaster. At least until I put these other drives in a landfill.
By the way, it’s now required that every hard drive box list the number of MP3’s you can store on a hard drive. That is a very important modern metric for space. Of course, along with that number, you need a disclaimer proving that that number is essentially arbitrary. My box’s disclaimer says,
“Examples of the number of photos, songs, and any other files that can
be stored on a hard drive are provided for illustrative purposes only.
Your results will vary based on file size and format, settings, features,
software, and other factors.”
That’s sexy. Mine holds 125,000 MP3s, and if I can’t fit every one of those on there, I’m suing. So, where can I legally aquire 125,000 MP3s, people?
Don’t forget to listen to Twit 154 in which Dvorak will joke about Greenwashing.