Friday I finally got around to replacing the drive that died in my Macbook Pro. I decided to get the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive as the prices for 256GB SSD drives were just way too far outside my price range. That laptop has a full load of Creative Suite, Logic Studio, Final Cut Express, Office, iLife, iWork…pretty much everything, 120GB of just apps and OS.
The Momentus XT is a 500GB 7200rpm laptop drive with a 4GB Solid State Disk on board, that intelligently caches your most used apps. Instantly my Macbook Pro was a beast, loading apps like Photoshop in 4-5 seconds. The problem was that now my Macbook Pro was faster than my Mac Pro!
Even though I had just replaced the boot drive in my Mac Pro with a 500GB physical disk, I decided it was time to have a little fun with it.
The Mac Pro runs a much smaller load, the boot drive, when cleaned up was just a shade over 30GB. Given that a 40GB would be a tad too small, I decided 80GB was the number.
Which SSD For Me?
A quick search revealed that the Intel X25M 80 GB Solid State Drive was the top contender for price and performance so I started there. $200 wasn’t too unreasonable, so I did a little reading to make sure it was what I wanted and found something very interesting.
The Intel X25V 40 GB Solid State Drive, in a RAID 0 pair, is the same price with even better performance. Given that is way nerdier than only one drive, my fate was clear.
I picked up the drives, came home and realized I had to take a quick detour, the Mac Pro only had one HD power connector in the spare drive bay the second optical drive should fit in. Both the Intel drives came with a standard to SATA power connector however, so a quick solder job and I had a splitter cable.
Using the included SATA cables, I routed them to the two unused SATA connectors on the Mac Pro motherboard. That works out great because you have two SSDs in RAID and still have all 4 drive bays for traditional 3.5” disks, no waste!
I put it all back together, booted the Snow Leopard disc, created the array and started a restore from my OS drive to the new drive. It took 12 minutes to copy 31GB from a 7200rpm 3.5” disk to the array of SSDs.
Once done, I opened the select boot disk preference pane and switched my boot drive. The first time, it booted up in about 20 seconds.
I took a slight detour to do some jiggering with my physical drives also, so now all of my data is on a 2TB RAID 0 array also giving me slightly faster speeds.
A Quick RAID 0 Lesson
RAID 0 is not REALLY RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) in that it’s not at all Redundant. If one drive goes, the whole volume is toast. In my case I decided to have a slightly unusual strategy to deal with that. I used the old 500GB boot disk as a Time Machine backup of my operating system drive, and I have the entire 2TB disk backed up to Mozy, yikes!
The bottom line is that you do RAID 0 for speed, striping data across disks increases the bandwidth for writing and reading data. Make sure you have a backup plan in place to take care of a data loss.
The Results
The results are nothing short of stunning. After a disk repair, the computer boots in 15 seconds flat, all of my apps just open in seconds, I created this quick video to show how fast, this is Adobe Photoshop CS5 loading after a clean boot.
If you are watching the counter, that’s 3 seconds. Given that I am writing my data elsewhere, the relatively (for SSD) slow write speeds of the 40GB lower end disks just doesn’t come into play. I get tremendous read speeds and my Mac Pro is snappier than ever.
Twitter is alight these days with discussions about the European Union and the fines they seem to dole out so nonchalantly. I regularly talk about how much I am frustrated with them because they effect my job so heavily. But like any good blogger, I decided to do a little reading and post some facts about the EU in order to add some validity to my position.
So What is the EU as it relates to Antitrust Laws?
In a word, scary. Imagine if you will, an organization that accounts for $18.4 Trillion, or 30% of the Gross World Product. It is comprised of 27 member states, mostly in Europe, and maintains common policies on trade, agriculture, and regional development. It also seems that it’s reach exceeds it’s member states’ borders significantly. The laws and fines they regulate apply to any company that operates within their bounds.
The mind boggling part is that not only is there little to no recourse for US companies, but there is really no accountability for the European Union and they don’t seem to fine based on the business being done within their borders but the value of the overall company in question. The amazing part is the countless billions that they assess in fines are not in any way used to help the markets that they are protecting competitiveness within, but kept and used to fund it’s own projects.
The Competition Commissioner, Neelie Kroes, is considered to be in one of the most powerful positions in the world, notable for the ability to affect the commercial interests of trans-national corporations. In 2001 the Commission for the first time prevented a merger between two companies based in the United States (GE and Honeywell) which had already been approved by their national authority. Another high profile case against Microsoft, resulted in the Commission fining Microsoft over $1 Billion following nine years of legal action.
Microsoft: The Big Target
Since 2000, the European Union has raised 42 lawsuits against Microsoft, but it’s not just about the money. Originally Microsoft was being sued because Novell said that we were blocking competitors out of the market using anti-competitive practices. The complaint was based on Microsoft requiring computer manufacturers to pay a royalty for the operating system even if the machine shipped without it. Microsoft settled in 1994 ending some of these licensing agreements.
In 1998, Sun Microsystems got involved complaining that Microsoft did not properly disclose interfaces in Windows NT. Somehow the European Union also reached out to look into how streaming media technologies were included in Microsoft Windows.
In case you are keeping score, we are in trouble at this point for trying to uphold licensing agreements that hinged on discounts provided to manufacturers for agreeing to only sell Microsoft’s product (a common practice), not completely documenting the inner workings of proprietary software, and allowing the customer to stream video over the internet with our operating system, but wait, there’s more!
To please the EU, Microsoft shipped Windows XP N, a version of Windows without Windows Media Player included. Of course the customer could still download it voluntarily, but somehow making us take it out and requiring the end user to go find, download and install (or potentially purchase) software to stream media (which nobody really did with Media Player at this time) is a better solution. You will see this pattern over and over, screw Microsoft, screw the customer, and help the competition.
At the same time, Microsoft released the source code, but not the technical specifications to Windows Server 2003 SP1 to members of it’s Work Group Server Protocol Program.
But Wait, There’s More
In 2005, the EU announced that Microsoft had not complied with the ruling by not completely disclosing all the details of it’s server products. The EU threatened to fine Microsoft roughly 3.2 million US dollars per day until it felt they had completely complied with the ruling.
In 2006, the EU fined Microsoft another half a billion dollars ($2.39M per day from 12/16/05 – 05/20/06) and threatened to increase the fine to $4.8M per day if Microsoft did not comply by July 31st, 2006.
In 2007 Microsoft lost their appeal against the EU case and nearly $800M in fines were levied. Along with this were requirements on interoperability information and bundling of Media Player. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft was forced to pay 80% of the EU’s legal fees.
Luckily it was rejected, but the EU also attempted to require that an independent monitoring trustee have unlimited access to Microsoft’s internal company organization in the future.
In 2007 Microsoft announced intent to comply and did not appeal the decision further. In 2008, the EU fined Microsoft an additional 1.44 Billion dollars for failure to comply with the March 2004 decision, representing the single largest penalty ever imposed in the 50 years of the EU Competition Policy.
The 2008 Microsoft Annual Report stated:
The European Commission closely scrutinizes the design of high-volume Microsoft products and the terms on which we make certain technologies used in these products, such as file formats, programming interfaces, and protocols, available to other companies. In 2004, the Commission ordered us to create new versions of Windows that do not include certain multimedia technologies and to provide our competitors with specifications for how to implement certain proprietary Windows communications protocols in their own products. The Commission’s impact on product design may limit our ability to innovate in Windows or other products in the future, diminish the developer appeal of the Windows platform, and increase our product development costs. The availability of licenses related to protocols and file formats may enable competitors to develop software products that better mimic the functionality of our own products which could result in decreased sales of our products.
I can personally attest to the validity of this statement. Shake the monopoly war stick if you want, but show me another company that is required to so publicly document the inner workings of proprietary products at the detriment of their value and at the same time struggle against these kinds of technical handcuffs while still staying relevant and innovative in such an incredibly competitive marketplace. Who is protecting the investors in Microsoft?
$2.5 Billion Dollars Later
Currently the EU is investigating potential fines against Microsoft for it’s Microsoft Office Open XML file format as well as for bundling Internet Explorer with the Windows Operating system. My last blog post about browser fairness is a good read if you are curious about the impacts that could have on Microsoft.
The questions I pose are, should an organization have this much power over what results in the products, services and developments of companies in today’s marketplace? Is there some argument to be made for Corporate Darwinism? I often ask my friends and colleagues, “Who is in charge of the Monopoly Gauge?” meaning who decides when we are no longer big enough to have to comply with these rules? It’s the logical question since other very powerful companies like Apple, Sun, Oracle and many more gain significant advantages by the restrictions placed on Microsoft by the European Union.
Although some of my friends at AMD will shift uncomfortably in their chair when I say this, it looks like Intel is next on exclusive list of US companies fined billions of dollars by the European Union. I for one am a capitalist and a Darwinist. I believe that with a few exceptions (life sustaining services for example) this country and it’s businesses were built on competition, and if companies can’t create products and services compelling enough to compete, no government organization should create what is in effect “big business affirmative action.”
While getting my morning feed fix, I ran across this article by Charles Cooper called “Judging Wintel on the eve of a new era.” The article is opining that the rise of very low cost net books using low cost Windows licenses and cheap Intel Atom processors is going to spell doom for Microsoft and possibly Intel by cannibalizing full size Windows and high power CPU licenses. Well let me make this clear to you, if there is going to be a revolution, the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by CNN, CNET and Fox News. The revolution will not be sponsored by AMD and Linux. The revolution will not take place.
Why do you ask? Do I have some magic crystal ball telling me the future of computing in the world? Do I not believe in cloud computing? Well, the answer is no and not totally.
The Great Net book Takeover
I have a net book, last night you might have read I installed Windows 7 on my net book. I think it’s the coolest gadget to come across in the $350 price range in ages and it’s amazing that all that can be had for what an iPod cost two years ago. I would give anyone who asks the same advice, “Sure, if you have the money to blow, buy one!” But there are a few things I wouldn’t do. I would never tell someone looking for their one and only computer to buy a net book. I have the larger of the net book class, the MSI Wind. It has a 10.1” Screen, upgraded to 1.5GB of ram and a 120GB hard drive. What’s not to like?
I could never get any real work done at 1024×600 resolution on a 10” screen. No Photoshop, no real Excel, even many websites feel cramped.
Although you can touch type on the keyboard on the Wind, you can’t do it comfortably and surely not for any extended period of time.
As cool as it is, it’s cheap. It feels cheap. It cost $350. The case is fragile and it’s not exactly very well made.
That is not to say of course that it doesn’t have its appeal. It’s fantastically small, quite usable and ultra portable. My wife has one also and it now does duty as her personal laptop. That being said, her personal laptop use is pretty much Internet browsing, chat and email. Things technically she could do on an iPod Touch or similar device. I would see those devices becoming a bit larger and being more of a threat to net books than net books are to laptop and desktop computers.
A Computer in Every Home
This was Microsoft’s mission statement for a long time. I think even Bill Gates would tell you today that it was a bit short sighted. Microsoft wants many computers in every home and they are pulling it off. My mother and father have two. My oldest sister’s home has at least three. My younger sister’s home has two. My home has, well 8 or 9 but who’s counting. Windows Media center is making huge ground and could be powering your television sooner than you think. Home servers are becoming more and more common. In the next five years a common house hold could feasibly include a desktop, a laptop, a media center and a home server. Add several Xbox 360 or similar type media center extenders into the mix and your car, Sync is Microsoft too, and now you are talking about 7 operating systems in a normal family setting. A technology heavy family could tip a dozen easily.
Atom, Shmatom
Of course now there is a place for the Atom processor. Net books are a perfect fit and as it increases in energy efficiency, phones and portable devices like net tablets, portable game systems and media players will be next. All of these uses will do nothing to the lust for speed and power in processors. 3D graphics, touch interfaces, voice recognition, text to speech, video compression and decompression, games.. all of these things will consume more power than the latest CPUs can produce, and always will.
Despite the ‘it’s fast enough’ thoughts you may be having, it can and will always get faster. Industries much more power hungry than the average home user will require more and more power and it will make it’s way to the consumer and software companies will take advantage of it. You may have no idea what power hungry application will be essential to your daily life in 10 years, it might not even be on your radar.
So get out your plastic, buy your shiny new net book and enjoy it. But don’t put your card away thinking it will be the last computer you will ever need. You will probably find it’s the last computer you think of using. What’s your opinion. Is the net book a primary computer or an add on? Does it replace a notebook or is it an accessory. Is cloud computing an every day reality or a buzz word?
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