The Place to Be!

Here are some quick Xbench results comparing the WD Black to the G.Skill Falcon in my Hackintosh. The overall disk scores were WD Black: 78.93 vs Falcon: 315.82. You can see the individual read/write scores below, but if you want the Cliff’s Notes version…the Falcon puts the smack down!

WD Black 500GB:
Results 78.93
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J61)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model SomeModel
Drive Type WDC WD5001AALS-00L3B2 WDC WD5001
Disk Test 78.93
Sequential 141.14
Uncached Write 151.09    92.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 146.91    83.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 105.14    30.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 185.05    93.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 54.78
Uncached Write 18.14    1.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 291.30    93.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 112.53    0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 179.61    33.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]

G.Skill Falcon 128GB:
Results 315.82
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J61)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model SomeModel
Drive Type G.SKILL FALCON 128GB SSD G.SKILL FALC
Disk Test 315.82
Sequential 271.22
Uncached Write 380.85    233.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 378.63    214.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 137.15    40.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 456.59    229.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 377.98
Uncached Write 127.67    13.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 700.80    224.35 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 3161.37    22.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 993.55    184.36 MB/sec [256K blocks

-D

The G.Skill Falcon arrived today and I got a little bit of play time with it. I’ll do more on it later, but for now here are some first impressions. First, it comes excellently packaged. It’s a 2.5 incher, so it’s nice and light and compact. Installation is a breeze, just like any other drive. Oh…and it’s freakin’ fast! Yeah, for real. I only did a couple of time trials, but as you’ll see it impresses.
The drive I was using as my OS drive in the Hackintosh is a 500GB 7200RPM WD Black with 32MB cache. Great drive (I use a 640GB WD Black in my PowerMac…both have been solid.) I didn’t have time to really dig in for benchmarks so I just chose to time booting and a couple of big, slow loading apps to time. Results were as follows:

WD Black
Boot Time: 25 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 9 seconds (that surprised me)
Xcode: 6 seconds.

G.Skill Falcon SSD
Boot Time: 16 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 3 seconds
Xcode: 2 seconds

Big improvements!! Those are the slow loaders, normal apps like Safari, iCal etc load pretty much instantaneously. This system was already fairly quick and responsive for most tasks, but with the SSD I can tell that things run smoother and, as the numbers above attest, load times are dramatically faster. Now, if I can just swing another one somehow so I can get some RAID 0 action going

-D

After a few weeks of trying to talk myself in to some SSD sweetness for the Hackintosh I finally broke down this morning and ordered a G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD. I was going back and forth between the Corsair P128, the OCZ Vertex and Falcon and was leaning towards the Falcon. When I checked Newegg this morning (my 50th time there since Friday) I saw that they dropped 10 bucks off of the price and that pushed me over the edge. I’ll put some vids up of the speed increases when I get everything set up. In the meantime, this vid does a great job of showing just how fun SSDs are:

-D

Like everybody else, I anxiously waited for the iPhone 3.0 release today so I could update my iPhone and try out all that heavenly glory. Lunch rolled around and I saw my chance to fly the coop and head home for the upgrade. It went fairly smooth, except for the -4 errors I was getting from the onslaught of crazed iPhone users slamming Apple’s servers. When the phone was updated I was ready to try out all the snazzy new features, like MMS….and, uh…Tethering? Yeah, thanks Lame-T&T. So, since I wasn’t gonna be able to test those features out, I wanted to see what was up with the highly anticipated Push Notifications. Hard to find apps that support that just yet. But, I did come across what seems to be a decent source for apps updated to support PN. It’s probably the best I’ve seen yet today and says that it will be updated regularly. Peep it.

-D

This is absolutely awesome. Having been listening or watching Leo for about ten years now and I feel like I have his on-air personality down pat. I guess now that he’s doing so much video per week in a more informal nature we’re getting to see a little more of the off-air mode…and damn, I thought it was hilarious. Thanks to MConwell for posting this vid of Leo putting the verbal smackdown on Mike Arrington.

-D

I was watching the season finale of Numb3rs last Friday and Charlie and gang were trying to save Amita who had been kidnapped by Baltar from Battlestar Galactica who was…well, you probably should just watch it. Anyway, one of those typical scenes popped up where a bunch of impressive looking computer stuff was supposed to be on the screen, usually a bunch of BS. Not on Numb3rs, baby! Uh uh, they don’t roll like that. They were straight up busting out Obj-C code! I mean, they could’ve done C, C++, C#…some fake ass language, but they had to do how they do and make us Mac fans proud. Just look at those beautiful brackets and pointers and NSArrays. Just goes to show you, when somebody’s life is on the line the FBI and brilliant mathematicians know what to use. Obj-C saves lives.

-D

So, my big thing for the past few months has been the Hackintosh. Been having a blast with it and steadily moving towards it being my main day-to-day system. Having said that, the dual 2Ghz G5 has been my main system for 5 years and, despite not getting a lot of face time lately, it remains the primary repository for all of my docs, music, movies, contacts, photos etc. I still sync my iPhone on the G5 every morning, I still set up calendar events there and sync them with google…basically, yeah, I use the Hackintosh most of the time now, but the G5 is still the vault for Digital Dbot. So, it kinda sucked bawlz when Mrs. Dbot told me she heard some clicking noises from the office and
thought something was wrong with the G5. I checked it out and sure enough the main drive had gone belly up on me. Years of photos, music purchases, family holiday videos etc were on that drive which now only would be useful as a loud clacking metronome. (continue reading…)

Warner Bros. has a program that lets you trade up all those old dusty HD-DVDs you bought back when you thought Red was going to win and that your Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on was the shit. They’ll let you trade up to 25 titles…INCLUDING The Ultimate Matrix Collection! Yes!! I just couldn’t make myself spring for the whole collection a third time this close to buying the last one, so I’m looking forward to having them send me the Blu-ray collection as a trade up instead. (continue reading…)

Like I mentioned a while back, one of the reasons for building the Hackintosh was so that I could run a bunch of virtual machines on it and knock the rust off of some of my technical chops a bit. So, right away I slapped Server 2003, XP and Windows 7 beta on. They all worked surprisingly well, my fiance even used the XP VM every day for a couple of weeks before she got her MSI Wind. So, that’s all fine and dandy, but I was also gonna need to have a bare metal install of XP so I could get some of the more demanding games going that wouldn’t run great in a VM (I blame GelohPig..had he not got me UTIII I may have never done it!) So, I slapped another drive in the Hackintosh, installed XP and whenver I need to boot directly in to XP to get my game on I tell the BIOS to boot from that drive. Funny thing happened. The other day my girl was checking on some wedding stuff she had on the XP VM and left VMWare Fusion running when she was done. I looked at the console and was surprised to see that my 3 virtual machines had somehow become 4!! What? Take a close look at the picture above and you’ll see that VMWare Fusion found the seperate install of XP and added it to my list of VMs as a Boot Camp partition fully ready to boot! I was especially impressed with this considering I dismount the XP drive when I’m in OS X so I don’t cross any of the data up. So, of course, I had to try it out. I started the VM up and it booted right into XP without a hitch and installed VMWare Tools for me. Runs great. Only difference I can see is that you can’t suspend it like a standard VM because it has to contend with the fact that you might reboot the system directly in to XP at some point. For that reason, I’ll mostly stick with standard VMs because they resume from suspend so fast it makes it a lot more convenient to bounce in to the VM and do what you have to do and get out. But, for times that I might want to run something that’s on the physically installed version of XP and don’t want to leave OS X, this is a great option to have.

-D

Big thanks to Nix for posting this in the forum! An absolute beauty of a case mod. Take a look at the photo progression of the project and prepare to be in awe of this dude’s craftsmanship.

-D