Speeds and Feeds

As I continue to wind down Speeds and Feeds, I picked ruggedness as the topic for part 3.

In part 2 of this wrap-up series, I on Tuesday discussed reliability, suggesting that an increasing portion of the transistor budget in personal computers should be used to avoid, detect, and recover from hardware, software, and data errors.

Ruggedness, the ability of a PC to survive adverse physical conditions, complements reliability by further increasing the practical availability of a PC to do useful work.

As with efficiency in power management (part 1's topic), this is an area where PCs can learn a lot from cell phones. I expect my cell phone to continue operating normally unless it's physically damaged--and I expect that it will not be damaged even by fairly rough handling.

PCs, by comparison, are pretty fragile. I know that if I drop my laptop, even if it falls only a few feet to a carpeted floor, there's a good chance it will be damaged. The LCD could crack, the case could bend, the hard disk could crash, the battery latch could break. In fact, I've managed to do all of these things to one or more of the 15-plus laptops I've owned and used since 1984.

Not all laptops need to be rugged; for example, some laptops are used as small-footprint desktop computers and rarely moved at all, so ruggedness would be an unnecessary expense.

There are many situations, however, where greater ruggedness is obviously valuable: laptops for students (even in a classroom), field photographers, mechanics, factory workers, the military, and so on.

Some companies already make rugged systems for these applications, but demand for such systems is low, and they require a lot of additional engineering. The combination of small quantities and extra design work leads to very high prices; it isn't unusual to see rugged laptops with the features of a typical low-cost notebook selling for $4,000 or more.

There have been very few standard mass-market personal computers with any real degree of ruggedization. In the old days of 8-bit microcomputers, some consumer-oriented systems such as the popular Atari 400 and Commodore 64 were fairly robust due to heavy plastic cases designed to survive casual home use, but these weren't portable machines.

In the mid-1990s, Dell's Latitude line earned the favor of serious road warriors in part due to a high degree of ruggedness, if only in comparison with other mainstream laptops. Sometimes these Latitude models were the only survivors of annual notebook torture tests run by PC Computing magazine.

Panasonic's Toughbook line took over later in that decade as the first truly rugged notebooks. (I have a Toughbook 25 myself; alas, it's dead.) It's easy to see how these machines differ from ordinary notebooks: heavy magnesium casings with stiffening ribs to resist twisting, shock-mounted hard disks, water- and dust-resistant connectors, and so on. They aren't suitable for most people, though.

Three trends are bringing rugged systems closer to the mainstream today.

First, portable PCs are becoming increasingly more integrated into our daily lives. As power efficiency improves to the point that we can run them all day, portable machines will be even more important to us. But if these devices aren't rugged, we won't really be able take them with us as often as we'd like.

A simplified view of a small ruggedized notebook that I designed in 2005.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Second, the components themselves are getting smaller, lighter, and in some cases more rugged. It's possible to buy a decent dual-core CPU that doesn't need a huge heat sink. Solid-state disk drives are a huge step forward; and with 128GB of capacity requiring only 32 flash chips, they can be much smaller than traditional hard disks. Smaller, lighter components are easier to support and protect.

Third, materials science is making a lot of progress. The glass used in LCDs is much better today than it was a decade ago--better able to absorb shock and flex a little when needed. (It's actually a little scary just how flexible the displays of some super-thin notebooks are.) New chassis materials such as milled aluminum and CFRP (carbon-fiber reinforced plastic) can produce very strong machines, though in most consumer systems they're used to reduce weight instead. In the near future, carbon nanotube-reinforced materials will become available in commercial quantities; while expensive, they will be very strong.

These new materials can be used in new ways to make very rugged machines that don't have to cost dramatically more than existing systems.

In 2005, as a practical exercise, I designed a small notebook with a milled titanium case and a novel mechanical design that provided exceptional stiffness. With a fixed battery and few external connectors (another improvement enabled by new technology), it would have provided Toughbook-like ruggedness in a very small and convenient package.

That design didn't go anywhere, but there are plenty of designers out there. I expect that someone will develop something similar before too long.

The current Netbook craze is directing a lot of attention to ruggedness as a design goal. These machines are small, light, and obviously portable, but they tend to be cheaply made and more fragile than many consumers would like. Adapting these designs to more rugged enclosures would add significant cost, but I think there's a good market for such machines.

Much has been made lately about the trend toward solid-state drives. Now a new Intel technology, code-named Braidwood, may delay that trend, blending the performance of solid-state drives with the economy of old-style hard drives.

Braidwood--like its predecessor, Intel's Turbo Memory technology (formerly code-named Robson)--is basically a solid-state cache for all the disks in the system.

I heard about Braidwood earlier this summer on CNET (see "Intel 'Braidwood' chip targets snappier software" by Brooke Crothers). But I shrugged it off, assuming it would be no better than Turbo Memory, which left a bad taste in the mouth of many PC makers, end users, and Microsoft execs. Turbo Memory (and Turbo Memory 2.0) wasn't cheap, and it definitely wasn't worth the cost. The PC industry operates on such slim margins that every dollar's worth of hardware has to earn its keep--and Robson didn't.

But then I read an EE Times article this week by Mark LePedus describing a new report from Jim Handy of analyst firm Objective Analysis.

The 62-page report is titled "Intel's Braidwood: Death to SSDs?"

Handy's report argues persuasively that Braidwood might actually be worthwhile, and that got my attention. I've known him a long time, and he's a very good analyst--he's been covering memory and caching technology a lot longer than I have. He wrote one of the standard references for computer system architects, "The Cache Memory Book."

So I sent Handy a note, and he sent me a copy of the report. And now that I've read it, I'm inclined to agree with his conclusions, assuming the information he's obtained about Braidwood is accurate. It does seem reasonable, at least.

The first thing to understand is why flash memory can be a good disk cache. This boils down to its much faster access times: microseconds, not milliseconds. Flash can actually take much longer to write than a hard disk. But for reads, it's really quick. So if you can be smart about putting the right hard-disk data in the cache, especially by choosing the right time to do those write operations, you can save huge amounts of time on future disk reads.

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I suppose if I were just in search of controversy, I'd write a post to proclaim the death of the MID (mobile Internet device) category. My obituary for the Netbook earlier this week generated a ton of traffic; I suppose I could do that again. Certainly, the concept of a MID--a device midway in size and capability between smartphones and the smallest notebooks--is under tremendous pressure from both sides.

Customers have learned that with a well-engineered browser, the small displays on phones such as Apple's iPhone and T-Mobile's G1 "Google phone" are sufficient for most Internet applications (Web browsing, e-mail, chat, etc.). And as I described yesterday, small notebooks are quickly lifting themselves out of the "Netbook" ghetto, gaining performance and cutting power consumption to become reasonable alternatives for those times when a smartphone just isn't enough.

The tokidoki edition Fujitsu LifeBook U820 mini notebook.

(Credit: Fujitsu Computer Systems)

But I think there's still a legitimate niche for MIDs and other miniature mobile PCs. As I've mentioned here before, I used to carry around a 1.5-pound computing gizmo along with a conventional laptop. It was an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100--officially a PDA, not a MID--but it was as close to a MID as the technology of the time allowed. It came with a Web browser, and for a while I had mine equipped with a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, so I could access the Web and e-mail on the go.

It often seems to me that I would like to go back to that kind of device, rather than trying to make my iPhone and my laptop do the same jobs. In fact, I think my note-taking capability has actually declined with each new handheld platform I've adopted--the Newton was better than the Palm Treo, and the Treo was better than the iPhone. Today, when I attend conferences or want to scribble down some idea that can't be represented in a paragraph or two, I grab a Moleskine notebook (the pocket Sketchbook version).

My own experience is merely anecdotal evidence, however, and I know better than to rely on that. So what are the real markets for the MID?

Coincidentally, I think it works out to three E's: education, entertainment, and executive applications. All three areas lead to situations where a person might want access to more computing and communications resources than a smartphone can provide but won't necessarily want to carry around a notebook--or try to use one while standing--to get that.

The educational market for these small machines has yet to develop because current MIDs don't yet offer the right combination of small size, all-day battery life, and low price, but I believe they'll get there within the next year or so. People often talk about e-book readers as being the right answer for educational computing, but e-books are more about static content, and education is ideally an interactive process.

The entertainment focus was clearest with UMPCs (another dead category, though I'm hardly the first to point that out). UMPCs were marketed as "lifestyle" gizmos, as if many people were ever going to make a relatively bulky 7-inch display tablet PC with two-hour battery life part of their lifestyle. But in a smaller form factor--say a 5-inch display, a total weight under a pound, and battery life of at least five or six hours--a MID can fit this bill. As long as it's small enough (and rugged enough) to carry around in a purse or jacket pocket, and cheap enough to be written off to the entertainment budget like a Netflix subscription or a new TV, a MID could indeed become a lifestyle product.

The Viliv S5 Entertainment MID provides full PC compatibility in a PDA-size package.

(Credit: Yukyung Technologies)

I saw a gizmo at CES that fit this definition pretty well, the Viliv S5 from Korean consumer-electronics maker Yukyung Technologies. Yukyung is one of many companies making portable video players, but its new offerings are quite distinctive.

The S5 is like a right-sized UMPC, with a 4.8-inch touch-screen display (800x480 or 1024x600 pixels, depending on model). It can play HD video, and it comes with Windows XP on a real hard disk, so there's no problem installing other software.

The S5's Intel Atom processor provides very good battery life: the company specifies six hours of movie playback. The device is about 6 x 3.3 x 1 inches in size--a lot smaller than my old Newton--and weighs less than 14 ounces.

There are also two 7-inch screen Viliv machines, the X70 slate-style tablet and the S7 convertible tablet. Both, amazingly, are still smaller than my old Newton.

Executives have always been the focus of some high-end handheld PC developers such as OQO, Sony, and Fujitsu.

Fujitsu didn't have any major updates to announce at CES for its LifeBook U820 series, though it was showing a model with case art from tokidoki, an Italian (but Japanese-inspired) lifestyle brand, and I got a chance to talk with a couple of PR people from Fujitsu about the U820 and other Fujitsu products.

The U820 is basically a complete convertible tablet PC squeezed into a 1.3-pound package: a 5.6-inch touch-screen LCD with 1,280x800-pixel resolution, a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 60GB or 120GB hard disk, Windows Vista Home Premium, and so on. It offers pretty much every kind of communication technology a person could ask for: Bluetooth, a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional AT&T wireless broadband, and even a GPS receiver.

From my perspective, the U820 is actually smaller than it needs to be, which is most apparent in the micro-sized keyboard, but it's an impressive technical accomplishment nonetheless.

For many people, the new Sony Vaio P-series (a CNET Best of CES award winner this year) may prove to be more practical, with its 87 percent-pitch keyboard and 8-inch widescreen LCD. But the Sony is beyond all but the largest pockets. Sony has made smaller machines in the past, such as the Vaio UX series, but these have been discontinued.

The OQO model 2+ brings better performance at a lower price than earlier OQO models.

(Credit: OQO, Inc.)

OQO also made a big splash at the show with its new model 2+, an unprepossessing name for a product even more technically impressive than Fujitsu's. The new OQO machine has almost all the features of the U820, but in a considerably smaller, lighter package. There are some differences; the model 2+ has a lower screen resolution (800x480) but is available with a faster CPU and more RAM. Also, the OQO is available with an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display that really looks fantastic, with high contrast and deep saturated colors.

The model 2+ is in the same enclosure as the older OQO model 2, hence the trivial name tweak, but there's another big difference from that older product: the 2+ has a starting price of just $999, $500 less than the starting price of the 2. And the base model of the 2+ is a much better system than the high-end model 2 configuration was.

Just as there were some ARM-based Netbooks at CES, there were also some ARM-based MIDs on display. With no clear advantages over smartphones except for display size, I don't think these products will attract customers. But that problem is CPU-specific; it doesn't apply to the more powerful x86-based products.

So okay, there's some good MID hardware out there. Unfortunately, that isn't enough. What MIDs need are lower prices, more rugged designs, and some MID-optimized software. The fact that Windows runs on these small displays doesn't mean that style of user interface is right for them. I know people at Microsoft who are working on this aspect of the problem; I hope they get the chance to bring their solutions to market, ideally in the Windows 7 time frame.

All in all, there's a lot of interesting activity in these smaller form factors. I think these tiny machines face a long uphill struggle to gain market share, but at least they have a unique and clearly defined product concept: a PC in a pocket.

Much coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show is full of references to new Netbooks introduced at the show. But in fact, there were hardly any Netbooks at all, and those that did appear went almost unmentioned.

The truth is, the Netbook is dead, and good riddance. The concept of the Netbook was based on a tragic misunderstanding: the belief that tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide wanted a portable computer that was small, power-efficient, and (here's the misunderstanding) not good for much beyond accessing the Internet.

Asus's Eee PC T91 convertible tablet

(Credit: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.)

That's where the "Net" in "Netbook" came from: the Web, e-mail, chat, maybe some VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol communications).

That's what the earliest Netbooks delivered, too--machines like the Eee PC 701 from Asus (which I described here) that came with slow single-core processors, small amounts of RAM, small liquid crystal displays, and tiny, slow flash drives. They were good enough for light Web browsing and e-mail--and not much more. They wouldn't run Windows XP with acceptable performance, never mind Windows Vista.

Well, nobody wanted those machines. Companies that tried to sell them saw unprecedented return rates. Asus, for its part, couldn't upgrade the Eee PC fast enough; current Eee PCs have faster processors, more memory, larger screens, and larger flash drives or real rotating hard disks.

At CES, Asus expanded its line of Eee PC systems to include the S101, S101H, 701, 701SD, 701SDX, 900, 900A, 900HA, 900HD, 900SD, 901, 901XP, 904HA, 904HD, 1000, 1000H, 1000HA, 1000HD, 1000HE, 1000HG, 1002HA, 1003HG, and 1004DN laptops; the T91 and T101H tablets; and multiple Eee Top desktops. (Seriously! Most of these model numbers are on Asus's Eee PC site; the others are from CES. And I may have missed some.)

Certainly, all of these Eee PC systems were clearly distinct from Asus' mainstream offerings: Celeron or (mostly) Atom processors, 10-inch or smaller displays (on the laptops), and smaller amounts of RAM and mass storage.

But the fact is, they're all capable of much more than simple Web browsing. Asus specifically promotes the use of Windows XP Home with all of these machines, and it looks like they'd all run Vista as well, though perhaps without all the visual bells and whistles.

You wouldn't buy these machines to run Photoshop, edit high-definition videos, or play 3D games, but for most simpler purposes, they'd be fine.

In fact, as a cross-platform kind of guy myself, I'm thinking about getting one of those T91 tablets, when they go on the market later this year. I used to use a Motion tablet for meeting notes (with Microsoft Office OneNote, a great package) and PowerPoint presentations at Montalvo Systems, and I'd really like to do that again.

Small-screen laptops over the years. Foreground: a TRS-80 Model 100 (1983); rear, from left: an Apple PowerBook Duo 270c (1993), a Dauphin DTR-1 pen computer (1993), and an Asus Eee PC 701 (2007). From the author's collection.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

So what's left of the Netbook concept? Small displays? C'mon, we've had small displays since the dawn of mobile computing. There hasn't been a day since 1983 when you couldn't get a laptop with a small display.

So these new machines aren't merely Netbooks that are "evolving" or "overachieving". They're notebooks. And Moore's Law will ensure that these systems will eventually suffice for any fixed workload. (3D games get more demanding each year, so small notebooks will always be inadequate for bleeding-edge gaming.)

Actually, there were some true Netbooks at CES. What distinguished them from these other machines, which were merely called Netbooks?

Well, today, if you want to make a subnote with a few hundred MHz of processor power and really basic 2D/3D graphics, an x86 processor and chipset is the expensive way to get it. It's better to start with an ARM processor. Some of those are single chips with almost everything you need except RAM, and they'll save you up to $50 off the x86 alternatives.

Such Netbooks have been announced by several companies, including Pegatron, and LimePC. There's nothing wrong with these machines. I'm sure they'll do everything they're advertised to do.

But this still brings us back to that tragic misunderstanding: few people will buy an ARM-based Netbook priced at $199 to $299 when there are good x86-based notebooks starting at less than $400. Certainly not when the x86 machines can run Windows or a mainstream Linux distribution, provide far more CPU and GPU performance, and come in the same small sizes.

So that's that. The Netbook is dead. Long live the notebook.

We all know that conventional rotating hard disk drives aren't the sturdiest gizmos in the world. We're trained to treat our laptops gingerly when they're running, and many laptops are equipped with motion sensors that move the disk heads away from the data tracks if the machine is bumped or dropped.

But I've just learned that disk drives are more sensitive to minor vibrations than I thought. A blog post titled "Unusual disk latency" by Sun engineer Brendan Gregg describes how disk drives can go idle for relatively long periods of time-- over half a second-- when someone shouts at them!

The post even includes a video demonstration of the discovery.

Suddenly I no longer wish for more volume from the speakers on my MacBook Pro, and I'm reconsidering the position of the subwoofer under my desk next to the Power Mac...

I couldn't be at the Tuesday morning Apple launch event for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro systems, but I've had a chance to review the announcements.

Normally I focus on the technology in new products, but this time, I have to say my first impression is dominated by the appearance of these systems. These are some good-looking laptops.

Apple's new MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

The most dramatic change is the new display surround, black glass that goes right out to the edge of the upper case just like on an iPhone. The lower case also looks significantly cleaner now that the old gray plastic edging is gone. I never liked this edging on my MacBook Pro. It looks and feels like what it is: a compromise forced on Apple by the inherent difficulty of making bare metal edges meet cleanly.

Apple dealt with this problem on the new machines by relocating the case seams to the underside of the machine, where they're less visible--and where they can serve a more useful purpose, that of simplifying access to the battery, hard disk, and RAM. I'm especially sensitive to the whole hard-disk thing on the old machines, having upgraded my hard disk twice in two years.

The new case is what Apple calls a "unibody" design, recalling the term used in the automotive industry to describe a car chassis made by welding together many sheet-steel pieces...but in fact, Apple's new manufacturing is much more unitary than that. The lower chassis of all the new machines (as well as the original MacBook Air) is made by milling down a solid block of aluminum to the exact shape needed.

This approach makes for an exceptionally strong, stiff chassis. Milling (also known as stock removal) is more expensive than some other methods, but it provides almost unlimited design freedom. It's the same method I'd use if I were building low-volume, high-value custom notebooks; for Apple to be using it on high-volume system expresses a strong commitment to product quality. (The only method that would produce an even stronger chassis is net-shape forging, in which the metal is formed under high pressure to the exact shape required...but that approach would also be more expensive, and it imposes significant design constraints.)

I also really like the new trackpad. It's huge, and it supports more multi-finger gestures than a New York cabbie. My MacBook Pro uses two-finger dragging to scroll within the window under the cursor, and really, I think this was one of the greatest improvements in general usability in years. More gesture recognition should be even better. With any luck, Apple will support both one- and two-finger clicking for left- and right-clicking.

Apple's decision to use Nvidia chipsets is especially significant on the MacBook models, because the Intel chipsets usually used in midrange systems have really weak graphics. Mac OS X and many Mac applications rely on good 3D acceleration. Nvidia has it, Intel doesn't. On the MacBook Pro models, Apple would have included a good discrete graphics chip no matter who made the chipset, but the fact that both come from Nvidia made it easier for Apple to support switching between integrated and discrete graphics depending on whether the user needs battery life or 3D performance at the moment.

There are some things I'm not so sure about on these new systems. I generally prefer a matte-finish display, but there's no longer any alternative to a glossy, glassy screen. Apple says reflections are less of a problem with a high-brightness LCD such as these machines are equipped with, but I'd have to live with one for a while to believe that.

I'm also not sure if the crisp new aluminum edge around the keyboard and palm rests is entirely a good thing. It doesn't look any sharper than the edge on the plastic around my own machine, but the plastic has a glass-smooth and, more importantly, low-friction surface. This is another thing I'll have to try for a while before I can make up my mind.

Is this really the right time to shift all of Apple's portables to the new DisplayPort standard? Apple's new 24" Cinema Display with DisplayPort and a built-in MagSafe power supply is a very cool product, but most of the displays in the world use analog RGB (over a VGA cable) or DVI.

Apple used to throw in a free DVI-to-VGA adapter, but the new MacBooks require extra-cost adapters--three different ones!--for the same functionality, and some of these dongles are active electronic devices. It looks like one of these even needs to draw additional power from a USB port!

The battery-level indicator is now built into the side of the machine itself, rather than being part of the battery. This puts the indicator where it's easier to see when a battery is installed, which is good, but I wonder if there's another indicator on the battery itself, since it's even more important to know the condition of a battery when it isn't installed.

A few things that aren't quite so awesome:

There's no new 17" model, just a lightly updated version of the old 17" model. (If you really must have a matte-finish LCD screen on a MacBook Pro, that's the only way to get it.) I expect this is just a temporary situation.

There's no Blu-ray optical drive. At the post-announcement Q&A, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained that Blu-ray licensing "is just a bag of hurt" today, so the company is holding back until that gets straightened out.

The maximum RAM is still only 4GB. With OS support for considerably more, I was hoping Apple would remove that particular limit in this generation of notebooks. Personally, given my tendency to keep a dozen applications open plus, sometimes, Parallels Desktop running Windows Vista--and the low cost of DRAM today--I'd be happier with as much as 16GB of RAM.

Apple doesn't yet offer 500GB hard disks as a build-to-order option. With two companies making these drives, Apple's a little behind the times on this one.

There's no eSATA or FireWire 3200. The MacBook Pros still have FireWire 800, which is plenty good enough for any single-disk or dual-disk RAID boxes, but it's old technology now. (And as a commenter points out below, the MacBooks have lost FireWire 400, a problem for video editing and other applications that benefit from fast external hard disks.)

I mention these things because they matter...but really, not as much as the high quality and aesthetic appeal of the new machines. I'm not in the market for a new laptop quite yet, but if I were, I'd have placed my order by now.

Monday, I wrote about the process of upgrading the hard disk on my Apple MacBook Pro, and the as-yet unsolved problem of migrating the 20GB Boot Camp partition on the old hard disk--along with its Windows Vista installation--to a 32GB partition on the new drive. (See "Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem.")

Well, it's all working now. As I've always said about the Mac, most things are either easy or impossible...and this one turned out to be easy.

My thanks to my friend EDN senior technical editor Brian Dipert who provided half of the solution, and also to CNET member rob66778, who apparently signed up for a CNET account just so he could tell me about the other half. That was very kind of him!

Rob66778's contribution, in the comments to my post Monday, was to tell me about a program called WinClone, which can copy Boot Camp partitions to a disk-image file and then copy from the image to a different Boot Camp partition.

Equipped with this tool, I was able to wipe out the Boot Camp partition I'd previously created, use Boot Camp to create another one of the same size, and copy the Boot Camp partition from the old disk to the new one.

But I wanted a larger Boot Camp partition. I think now I could have just created a larger partition to begin with and WinClone would have handled it correctly, but I had tried that before--using a different tool to copy the partition data--and it didn't work.

So to be safe, I had WinClone make the exact copy, and used the program Brian suggested-- Paragon's CampTune-- to expand the Boot Camp partition to the size I wanted.

CampTune comes as an .iso file that is used to create a bootable CD just for this purpose. I burned the disc, booted from it, and everything worked perfectly for me. CampTune is currently "pre-release" software, though, so make sure you make reliable backups first.

At that point I was able to boot Vista from the Boot Camp partition, and when I rebooted into Mac OS X, I was able to run Parallels Desktop to bring up the same copy of Vista in a virtual machine.

So all is well, and I'm documenting the process here for the next person who needs to get this done.

I'll also second the comment on my previous post from CNET user Mr. Dee , who said that Apple's Time Machine software ought to take care of backing up and restoring Boot Camp partitions, since Apple is responsible for creating those partitions in the first place.

Please leave a comment if you try this process yourself, especially if you can confirm that WinClone can do the whole thing in one step. Thanks!

I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.

So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").

Samsung's Spinpoint M6 500GB mobile hard disk

(Credit: Samsung)

That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, there's a lot of free stuff there. I have a particular weakness for video podcasts about automobiles, such as VOD Cars and BMW's own video magazine, BMW-web.tv. Oh, and I've also lost some potential productivity to the Onion News Network video feed and the original Onion Radio News, which are also available through iTunes.

I hung tight through the 320GB generation of laptop hard disks, figuring that wasn't enough of a capacity improvement to justify the cost.

But shortly after Samsung started shipping the Spinpoint M6 model HM500LI, Montalvo Systems shut down, and I had other things to think about than upgrading my hard disk. I decided to wait for Hitachi or Western Digital to introduce a competing model, so I could make sure I was getting the best product when the time came.

Hitachi has a 500GB drive, but at 12.5mm thick, it won't fit in the MacBook Pro. Then Western Digital introduced the new Scorpio Blue, a 9.5mm drive with specifications pretty much identical to those of the Samsung drive. I was able to get a pretty good deal on the Samsung drive, so that's what I decided to go with.

I went through the same upgrade process I used last time, which I recommend to anyone upgrading a hard disk: back up the old disk to the new disk in an external enclosure before swapping in the new drive. With a Mac, it's easiest to do the backup by connecting both drives to another machine using the special feature called FireWire Target Disk Mode.

In this case, I only backed up the Mac partition this way, since Macs can't natively write to NTFS partitions; I used Windows to back itself up separately to a different drive.

After going through the usual grief involved in upgrading a MacBook Pro hard disk-- which I don't recommend to anyone who isn't very familiar with safe maintenance procedures for modern laptops-- everything just worked. The new drive is fast, silent, and huge, everything I love in a hard disk.

Well, all but one thing. The Boot Camp partition isn't so easy to migrate over. After booting from the new drive, I let the Boot Camp Assistant program create a new Boot Camp partition with an NTFS filesystem, then used Mike Bombich's NetRestore application to copy the old data to the new partition.

But although the copy proceeded normally and the new partition received all the files from the old one, it also received the old partition's size-- 20GB instead of the 32GB I had allocated for it. And it didn't come out bootable, nor would Parallels Workstation work with it, in spite of being configured to use the Boot Camp partition on the old drive.

I can't find anything online about migrating a Boot Camp partition when upgrading a hard disk. So let me ask all of you folks: does anyone know how to do this?

I'll post an update here when I get it figured out. In any event, I can always just wipe out the new partition and reinstall Windows...

Update: now solved! See my followup post: "Migrating and resizing a Boot Camp partition". Thanks to everyone who commented.

I miss the old SGI. Silicon Graphics was widely regarded as the greatest computer company in Silicon Valley back in the 1990s. Sometimes forgotten--but not gone--SGI was one of our greatest success stories and one of our greatest tragedies.

(Credit: Boxx Technologies)

Apple may have had more revenue by virtue of shipping millions of small systems, but SGI's hardware spanned the range from video-game consoles (the Nintendo 64) to workstations to supercomputers. SGI's Unix-based operating system, IRIX, was one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

I used to lust over SGI machines. I'd obsess over lists of used SGI gear, looking for a great deal that would let me have my own IRIX box at home. In 2004, I finally bought an Octane with MXI graphics... but that was years after these machines were effectively obsolete, and I paid less than 0.5% (1/200th!) of the original retail price of the machine.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, SGI was not well managed, losing huge amounts of money because its leaders would not... Read more