SimpleBlog

Finally, my new eSATA-expresscard34 arrived, an “Inside hide AKE Express To eSATA Card” (eBay).

Now, my external HDD enclosure (Lacie, but without FW800) may not only be connected via USB and FireWire, but also via eSATA. So to show it does make sense to give away daisy-chaining for this, I benchmarked and compared all these connections.

Daisy-chaning is the ability to connect more than one firewire device on the same port. Instead of using an (USB-)hub, nearly every firewire device has two ports, acting as in- and output. Using this technologie, you can connect up to 16 devices using one single port.

For testing I choose the Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ, a not-that-new 1TB SATA-HDD with 7200RPM and 32mb Cache.
It’s connected to my MacBook Pro 15″ 5,1 (Unibody, Late 2008), equipped with a Corsair P-256 SSD and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3, using Xbench 1.3 as the benchmarking-tool.

Because a pictures says just more than a thousand words, here you go with the results:

As I expected, USB is the slowes, followed by FireWire. eSATA is the fastest of all connections. Here the Xbench points altogether:

Please do not forget: This is always the same HDD in the same enclosure. The only thing which differs is the connection!

My conclusion: Big files and TimeMachine-Backups will be transferred by eSATA only, from now on! And buying the card for a mere 8.40€ was defenitly worth it! So, in all day use, what does all this mean? Well, copying 6.66GB (seriously, size of the 10.6 install-dvd) takes about 70-80 seconds.

Mac OS X does not have any problem with this card, it’s bound into the system without installing any drivers and even get’s a little icon in the menubar at the top:

A little gimmick: simplePower recognises the card and shows the status of the connected HDD:  (2: active)

•  German

Being a proud owner of a MacBook Pro I’m often pretty excited to see how long my battery lasts. Sometimes it’s just incredible what I can do without even thinking about an outlet at all!

But there are days I am surprised by something very different: Where has my remaining time gone? How is it possible my battery has just gone empty?!
Some applications running in the background, USB-Devices loading theirs batteries (iPhone ) and several other things do their job to surprise my with this gentle message reading “Your battery is nearly empty.”.

Well, having situations like these in mind I developed a solution for me: simplePower. A small and lightweight Menubarapplication, that shows how much energy my Mac is consuming right now.

But that’s not all. Since there is a SSD in my MacBook running at incredible speed, I swapped my Superdrive with a 2nd harddrive, in order not to loose too much space. The only problem is I never know whether this hdd is running or not, apart from putting my ear onto the MacBook and testing it. But I want to know this!

This is why simplePower show the status of all internal hdds, if more than 1 hdd is detected. Thus, you can watch all your hdds at once!

The display is as following:

(X mAh): If X is greater than 0, your battery is charging. Otherwise your MacBook is running on battery. When your battery is fully loaded, this is not shown.

HDD-Status:
0 – HDD is sleeping and doesn’t consume any power
1 – HDD is idle. It will go to sleep shortly, if it’s not accessed.
2 – HDD is running and consuming power.

HDDs are sorted as they are connected to the logic board. (This is the same order as in Systemprofiler.app)

If you have any comments or ideas, let me please know in the comments of this post!

You can find the download right here: simplePower (Tested under Snow Leopard, but I see no reason it should not work under 10.5)

•  German