Nov 30

Time to get an SSD…

hardware No Comments »

If you don’t yet have an SSD in your Mac, it’s time to upgrade!

By far the biggest speed boost on a Mac comes with upgrading the Hard Disk to an SSD. A faster processor (i7 etc) will improve the speed of some tasks, more RAM can avoid a slowdown, but a faster SSD improves the speed of everything. If you still have an old Hard Disk I can’t say how strongly I suggest upgrading.

a faster SSD improves the speed of everything

I received an email today from Amazon telling me that 240GB SSD drives are AU$42.19. I just checked the US store and you can get a 1TB Crucial MX500 drive for $94.99. These prices are ridiculously cheap.

This article back in August 2018 is about how to upgrade to an SSD drive. But back then a 480GB drive was $1579.99!

If you are running a 2012 MacBook with an old SATA drive, or even a 2018 iMac without an SSD, grab one, and install it. It’s not complicated.

There are good instructions at macfixit.

How to pull apart an iMac

How to pull apart a macbook

How to pull apart a Mac mini

Check out your Mac first to see if the Hard disk is upgradable.

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Dec 25

Fusion drive on OSX with two SSD drives

advanced 26 Comments »

The new Mac Minis have super fast SSD Drives. I measured read times of 2500MB/s which is 5 times faster than the SSD drive in my old mac mini. But these drives are super super expensive. (An extra US$1400 for a 2TB drive). So I thought it might be an option to buy a Mac Mini with a small internal drive (256GB) and add an external SSD drive and combine them into a fusion drive. It didn’t work! But I thought I ‘d write a post in case anyone else has the same idea.

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Oct 11

What is the ‘Other’ data hogging all the disc space on my macbook?

performance No Comments »

I have a friend who  has a 120 GB MacBook Air and his hard drive was filling up. There were lots of suggestions on the Internet as to what might be causing it – Spotify cache,  system files, movies,  but what’s the best way to find out what is using up your hard disk space?  An old but I think still the best application for doing this is Disk Inventory X.  I wrote an article back in 2010 on how to use it here: Disk Inventory X.   Seven years later disc inventory X is still the best app for this so here’s a bit of a reminder on how to use it.

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Dec 23

If your data and time REALLY matters to you…

hardware No Comments »

pegasus

Last week I had a hard disk crash.  If you’ve had a hard disk crash you may know it can take a day or two to get things up and running again, a day or two that I didn’t have.  I was flat our trying to get away on holidays before Christmas. Thankfully, I have a Promise Pegasus RAID array, and I can’t believe how great it was. I was up and running again in 30 seconds – I kid you not!  This article describes how it works for those who might be interested.

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Nov 10

How I saved 30 GB of disk space in El Capitan

performance 7 Comments »

elcap

My MacBook Air is running a 120GB SSD drive so I don’t want my hard drive full of excess things I don’t need. I just noticed after El Capitan that I lost a lot of space. I only had 10GB free. To run well a mac hard disk needs at least 20% free.  Here’s how I freed up some more space.

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Mar 08

How to format a thumb drive, hard disk or SSD drive.

hardware No Comments »

util

You may not know that USB Thumbdrives come in different formats. This article explains why this matters and how to format a USB drive into the format that you want.

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Nov 07

Does my Mac need a bigger Hard Disk?

beginners, movies 2 Comments »

Did you know that more free space your Hard Drive has the faster it will operate?

Did you know that it should never be over 90% full?

How can you tell if getting a bigger hard drive will help your computer run faster?

Here’s how to see how full your macintosh computer hard disk is and what to do about it.

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