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Toshiba Launches 64GB Flash Drive, Possibly Bound for an iPhone Near You

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:27:25 +0000

If you have a 64GB iPod touch and you read this headline, you might be thinking, “What gives? Isn’t this already a no-brainer?” but the fact is, before Toshiba announced its 64GB drive today, there was no way to cram that much storage into the iPhone in its existing configuration. The 64GB touch features two 32GB modules, whereas the iPhone can only support one, since it needs all the extra space for its various wireless radios.

The new chip is a single-package solution, comprised of 16 32Gbit (4GB) chips combined on a 32nm platform. In case anyone out there needs help with the math, this announcement also paves the way for a 128GB iPod touch, which would finally bring it almost up to par with its aging disc-based predecessor, the iPod classic.

Toshiba doesn’t mention Apple by name in its product announcement regarding the new high-capacity flash modules, but it does mention that they are “designed for application in a wide range of digital consumer products, including smartphones, mobile phones, netbooks and digital video cameras.” It seems Apple would make for a great higher profile customer to use the new tech in its products in those categories.

It’s not completely beyond the realm of possibility to imagine Toshiba’s new storage modules making their way into Apple’s much talked-about tablet device, either. If indeed we will see the tablet in 2010, many now expect it to arrive either in Spring or sometime during the second quarter of 2010, which does fit with the proposed production roll-out of the 64GB flash device. Samples of the new module are shipping now, with mass production expected to begin in Q1 2010.

If Apple’s device is keeping a slim profile, as recent potentially leaked video seems to suggest, and if it owes more to its iPod and iPhone brethren than to the Mac line, it stands to reason that Apple would opt for this kind of storage option over a more traditional HDD or SSD. If the device is indeed the multimedia wunderkind many blogs and analysts are predicting it will be, I’d probably pay extra for additional storage configuration options that would allow me to bump up the storage capacity to 128GB, too, which would be an easy option to include using the new modules.

While it was inevitable that 64GB flash modules would come to pass, it’s nice to have confirmation that they’ve in fact arrived, and well in time for the launch of the next iPhone revision this upcoming Spring. Tablet or not, Apple’s smartphone at least is poised to outpace the competition in terms of onboard storage by an even greater margin than it currently enjoys.

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My Book Drive “Turbo” Hardly the Case

Matthew Bookspan — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:00:42 +0000

In early December of last year, the folks at Western Digital released some new USB/Firewire “Turbo” drivers for their My Book line of external storage devices. There was no mention of this news, nor was there a press release issued from the company.

For my own storage purposes, I own a My Book Pro II (1TB) drive. I use it to backup my audio (iTunes) and video (Sony HD Camcorder) content. This drive is connected to my iMac via FireWire 800.

When I stumbled upon the Turbo Drivers a month ago, I decided to take the risk and install them. There is no readme included with the installer, although from the download page, here is the information Western Digital provides:

“This installer – WDMacTurboDrivers.dmg, contained within the WDMacTurboDrivers.zip file installs custom Western Digital performance based Turbo drivers and drive icons for WD USB and FireWire enabled external hard drives under Macintosh computers.”

So what happened after I installed the drivers? Other than the icon changing (see below), I can’t see any performance benefits. After recently performing a search on the Western Digital support site, here is what I found:

Question:

Why is there no performance gain using the WD Macintosh Turbo Drivers for a My Book Premium II, Pro II, or Studio II while connected by FireWire?

Cause:

The My Book Premium II, Pro II, and Studio II Edition hard drives use a Macintosh based performance driver already included in the Macintosh Operating System. This Macintosh based performance driver has the same performance as the WD Macintosh Turbo Drivers.

Resolution:

There is no resolution for this as there is no performance gain or loss due to the usage of either the Macintosh based performance drivers or the WD Macintosh Turbo Drivers.

OK, who isn’t confused by this explanation from Western Digital? What is the value of creating these custom “turbo” drivers, other than changing the icon? Is it just for branding? Why did Western Digital spend the software development cost to implement a useless driver? In these economic times, I would think that Western Digital would be more cost conscious.

By the way, here is the visual change for the disk icon:

Before:

After:

Impressed by the visual change? I would hope not, but then, we all have different aesthetic values.

Overall, I am pretty disappointed by this offering from Western Digital. My expectations were that I would see improved read/write performance from this driver. Instead, and clearly stated from Western Digital, there is none.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t do any formal speed tests comparing the standard Apple FireWire driver vs. the new Western Digital Turbo driver. I mistakenly fell into the marketing trap of “ooh-faster-from-company-must-be-better-than-Apple-nonsense.”

Thankfully, I have neither seen any impact to my overall system stability, nor any negative impact to the My Book Pro II drive itself. If anyone else has tried these drivers, I would love to hear your feedback and see if you have received any benefit from installing them. Otherwise, you can thank me for being your guinea pig.

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Carbon Copy Cloner Makes Creating Bootable Backups Easy

Charles Moore — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:00:23 +0000

One of the things I loved about the old Mac OS Classic was that to create a bootable disk, all you had to do was make a folder named System Folder, drag in System and Finder files and an Appearance Folder, then drag your bare-bones System Folder to a disk — hard drive, Zip, floppy, CD-R, etc — and voila! you were in business. Usually one would add a few more items like Control Panels and Extensions folders, Preferences and Fonts folders, but it was a simple, quick and not-too-dirty way to make bootable disks.

Alas, you can’t do that with OS X and its thousands of tiny, usually invisible files, but the next best thing is disk cloning, which is to make a copy of an existing bootable volume on another disk or drive. This is excellent for backups, but has the added advantage of allowing you to create bootable disks without going through the hassle of running an OS X installer program.

There are several software utilities available that can clone drives, but it’s hard to go wrong with Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, which is offered as uncrippled shareware, with donations suggested if you like the software and decide to continue using it once you’ve checked it out.

Backups Too

Besides drive cloning, Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to do backups and drive synchronization. supporting any HFS+ formatted partition or hard drive (excluding volumes used for Time Machine) as well as FireWire and USB hard drives, including iPods. Note that not all FireWire hard drives are bootable with Mac OS X, and while it is sometimes possible for Intel-based Macs to boot from USB hard drives, it’s not a sure thing.

Note also that for bootability you must format the FireWire drive with the appropriate partition map using Apple’s Disk Utility or other formatting software. The Disk Utility formatting selection sheet (Options button) is self-explanatory.

You can read more about formatting issues and my using CCC to create a bootable clone of my main hard drive to a SimpleTech Duo Pro Hard Drive here.

CCC’s marquee function is cloning one hard drive volume to another, copying every single file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. Aside from the obvious comprehensive backup you get, if it’s done to a bootable volume you can, say, send your computer in for repairs while continuing to boot and use your standard work configuration until you get your computer back, then just clone the FireWire drive’s updated content back to your internal drive.

Using CCC for Backup and Synchronization

CCC can also be used as a backup utility. When you select a source volume, CCC displays the contents of that volume (including normally hidden items). Uncheck items that you don’t want to back up, select a target volume, and press the clone button. CCC also is smart enough to scan the source and target volumes for files to be copied, and only copy only files that have changed. You can also schedule automated backups.

Another advantage of CCC backups is that rather than using proprietary archival methods, CCC backs up your data to an ordinary filesystem that you can browse in the Finder. To restore your backup data, just select your backup medium as the source drive and the backup destination as your new target volume, and let CCC do its stuff.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 also supports cloning to disk images, which you can use to restore content to a physical hard drive and produce a bootable, exact clone of the original.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3 requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later. Version 2.3 is still available for Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 users.

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Using Time Capsule as a Media Drive

David Appleyard — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:00:58 +0000

As someone with a large media collection (around 550GB), I’m always looking for inventive new ways to store, backup and stream all my content.

One of my main annoyances with simply storing media on an external drive is that you obviously need to have the device physically plugged in. My Lacie Drive worked well, but was bulky, heavy and impractical for watching media anywhere other than at my desk.

When Time Capsule was released, my first thought was that it could make a great way to store content on a network disk and stream music/video to iTunes, and photos to Aperture. This would allow me to access all my media from anywhere around the house — freeing me from the confines of a desk.

This guide will take you through that very process and explain what works well and what simply won’t.

A note on performance

The first thing to consider is how performance will be impacted. At present, your external drive will have a fast USB or Firewire connection, which poses no problems for streaming video (a fairly intensive operation). There are a few things to consider and words of caution with moving this to a networked device.

Will you be wired or wireless? – If you have a few wired network points around your house, performance should be just fine. Gigabit ethernet — while not as fast as USB or Firewire — can easily support streaming video and other operations at the same time. Wireless works brilliantly for music, but depending upon reception can cause some ‘jumpy’ video performance. If you have an excellent signal there shouldn’t be a problem.
Do you have 802.11n? — This is the latest standard for wireless. All new Apple machines have support for it, but it may be worth checking if yours does. It can help to mitigate some of the issues with wirelessly streaming video.
What do you use the external drive for? – If you store applications or large amounts of frequently used data (such as Photoshop files or large database files), you’ll probably benefit from a wired network connection.
Do you have an Apple TV? – If you want to stream media to your Apple TV, you’ll need to ensure that your Mac is connected to the Time Capsule via an ethernet wire. Otherwise the video is being sent from the Time Capsule to your Mac wirelessly, then again wirelessly to the Apple TV — a recipe for disaster!

Setting up iTunes

If you’ve decided to go ahead, the first thing to set up is iTunes. You’ll need to create a folder on your Time Capsule to store all your iTunes content (I use ‘Media’). Proceed to connect the Time Capsule to your Mac via an ethernet cable and copy the whole content of your current iTunes folder across. This could take anywhere from 5 minutes to 20+ hours depending upon how many gigabytes need to be transferred.

Once this process has completed, you need to open iTunes and change the folder of your music library (Preferences > Advanced). iTunes will spend some time attempting to re-organize and point to the folder, but this process rarely works. Instead, you’ll need to ‘Consolidate’ your library:

Once this process has completed, you should (all being well) have a functioning wireless iTunes library. Go for a trip around your house and see how it performs!

Setting up Photos

My photo application of choice is Aperture, and I’ve found that it works fairly well through a network drive. Startup time is a little slower but, once the application is running, performance is great. Set up is as a simple as copying your Aperture library to the Time Capsule, heading into preferences and updating Aperture’s location. Upon launching the application again you’ll be working from the remote copy. Easy!

If you use iPhoto for managing digital photos the process is equally simple:

Quit iPhoto if it is open.
Open your Pictures folder. Drag the iPhoto Library folder to your Time Capsule.
Hold down the Option key on the keyboard and open iPhoto. Keep the Option key held down until you are prompted to create or choose an iPhoto library.
Click Choose Library.
Locate and select the iPhoto library on the Time Capsule.

You’ll be able to edit your holiday snaps and frustrate your family with a lengthy slideshow from anywhere in the house!

iMovie… Not Just Yet

At present, iMovie isn’t able to work from a network drive. It is a limitation imposed by Apple, probably rightly so, as the application wouldn’t work without a very fast connection to the data it is working from. Scrubbing through video is a very intensive process and, without a USB or Firewire connection, iMovie would likely be unusable.

Backup Implications & Conclusion

As someone who likes to back up regularly, I use the aforementioned Lacie disk to regularly mirror the Time Capsule to. This has the advantage of backing up both my media library and Time Machine backup files at the same time.

If you give this walkthrough a try, please do let me know how it goes. I’m really interested to hear how you find the performance of wired vs. wireless connections, and any other applications which benefit from having a centrally stored library.

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ZFS Not Out, Not In Either

Nick Santilli — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:24:43 +0000

Apple shed a little light today, on the lack of ZFS appearing on the Leopard information pages. It seems that ZFS will not be the default file system in Leopard – this much we’ve already deduced. But how exactly will Apple be supporting it?

is only available a read-only option from the command line,

Read-only means that at a later date, if there are ZFS volumes, those systems would be able to read ZFS volumes

What this means to the rest of us is that we can’t write to a ZFS drive with Leopard. However if you’ve got some server (Solaris being most likely) running ZFS, Leopard will allow you to read that drive. Um, woohoo? I guess it could be worse, and we’d get no comment/support on the ZFS front, but this is clearly a let down. If you’re not sure why ZFS is a big deal, there’s a great article about it here.

I’ve been defending the Keynote and somewhat lackluster features in the past couple posts, but I think I’m about to surrender my stance at this point. Microsoft took an awful lot of heat for delays and cutting back all the breakthrough features that Longhorn (Vista) was to ship with, most notable being WinFS. Now here we are on the eve of Leopard – which has suffered its own delay in ship date – and the much-hyped ZFS will be absent from the party for Apple as well.

It almost appears that Cupertino has been using their photocopiers…

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