Following the huge buzz around the defective notebook batteries manufactured by SONY and recalled by many of its customers (among them Dell, apple, Lenovo/IBM, Toshiba, etc.), SONY has decided to launch a recall for its notebook batteries. There are currently no numbers nor calendar available for such recall operation available yet.
Following requests from users
on the French forum, J.F. gave us some more information about the fixation system for his seven hard drives.
For the support, I've only used four metal brackets you use to install 3.5'' hard disks in a space dedicated for a 5.25'' CD drive. Here's what they look like:
I got them for free from CIPC informatique in Montreal (probably because I purchased two 750GB drives!), but I've seen them being sold as separate parts by Microbytes for $5 the pair.
I had to make holes with an electric frill for the disk in the middle, and as there are only two Molex PATA power plugs in that place, I used an Y-shaped 1PATA->2SATA adapter ($7).
The fan only cost me $25. It is a Silenx Ixtrema 80mm Pro Series and is reputedly a very quiet one although I'm not really a fan expert (but you might be able to judge by yourself with those characteristics: 14dBA and 24CFM). I fitted the fan with its rubber feet and slid it in the space available between the brackets the lateral side of the hard disks. It is tight enough so there is no need to screw it or stick it, and the rubber feet actually absorb all the vibrations.
I should add that the reason I bought this fan is not its quietness, but rather the fact that it has an IN/OUT Molex plug, so no need for any other power connector. It is indeed very quiet, but given the natural quietness of the MacPro, it is still slightly more noisy than the other fans if he computer is not under heavy workload.
So I got two SATA cables and one PATA (with two connectors) for the data. I also have two Molex PATA connectors for powering. The one at the end of the cable goes into the PATA disk and the middle one in the fan's Molex plug, which itself is plugged through the Y-shaped PATA to the two SATA cables used to power the SATA disks.
The only tricky part is to find a place for the cables! After a few attempts, I realized that the best compromise between an undisturbed airflow and easily packed cables is to put the disks aside in the MacPro, which quite differs from the DVD-Drive's original position. Thus I installed the PATA disk above the other two so I could cram the extra length of the PATA cable above (where there is some empty space).
A few minutes after starting the MacPro, I quickly noticed that the array of disks was surprisingly cool - like "not hot" I mean. The temperature in my room was 23.6 Celsius, and the one between the middle disk and the bottom disk... 30.6 Celsius (at least that was the result given by the internal temperature probe). All right I wasn't rendering HD video or the like, just a zero all data format of the middle disk. Since then, I've moved the probe inbetween the two top disks and there the temperature rose to 32 Celsius.
The screws I removed...
More pictures...
And the Superdrive ? Well, on a machine dedicated to production its only use is the occasional software installation. J.F. has therefore put it in an external enclosure.
REALbasic 2006 Release 4 is available, bringing support for Universal Binary. In addition, it allows the automatic porting of non UB-REALbasic applications into UB versions.
For sure the number of UB applications available for MacIntel will dramatically increase in the coming weeks.
Earlier this year, Japanese tech company Softbank purchased Vodafone Kabushiki Kaisha (Japanese branch of giant Vodafone, which, in its time, acquired Japanese tele-operator J-Phone). As of October 1st, they are selling services under their own brand. Since they are quite new in the field, they partnered with Apple Japan for their launching campain. Here are the banners displayed in Tokyo's metropolitan network:
For each new 3G Softbank contract, you get a silver 2GB iPod nano. Now, people love to speculate about Apple entering the mobile telephone market, but I won't partake !
Macfixit reports incompatibility issue when installing in a Mac Pro a GeForce 7300 and a Radeon X1900XT.
The problem is affecting Core Image that is not working on the Radeon whereas it is fine with the GeForce.
While waiting for a fix from Apple, the only way to get the best Core Image performance is to remove the nVidia GeForce 7300.
