News for Saturday, 26 January 2008

The war on data density is still going on in the HDD-market, everybody's trying to push as much data on a single platter as possible.
Western Digital has just released a 3.5" disk that stores 320 Gb on a single platter!
This has two consequences:
- First, cheaper drives: because less parts are used, producing these drives is cheaper, and they'll probably cost around $100.
- Second: drives with huge capacity, close to 1.3 Tb (using 4 platters and 8 heads).
The fact that they're starting with the first option, proves that the market prefers a better capacity/price ratio rather than pure storage capacity, and they're serving mostly OEM-resellers (who tend to offer cheaper drives instead of top-of-the-line products).
Another advantage of having less moving parts in a drive is its lower power usage, and consequently less heat inside the drive.

As we now see each day, the Refurb Store is again full of portables. Within our memory this is the first time that that we have daily proof that Apple has so many machines to destock in this way. Although these are good deals for those with a reduced budget, one knows with certainty that most machines will be updated within some weeks.
@Le Refurb Store

From the Apple site:
"Say Time Machine is in the middle of a backup and you want to shut down your Mac or put it to sleep. Who wins? Like you have to ask. Time Machine simply stops the backup process and remembers where it is. It automatically resumes when your Mac is active again."
Jobs seemed to be very proud of the fact that the hard disk in Time Capsule is "server-grade"; and for very good reason after all. In the interest of keeping wireless backups intact and consistent, Apple may have used drives compatible with the "F_FULLSYNC" command. Available mostly on server-grade drives, this command keeps file system changes intact, even over interrupted backups; resuming where it left off.
Time Machine supports the command
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1,
which could enable backups over general network volumes, albeit with a loss of reliability. Obviously this is not a default Apple-supported feature. However, this command may also allow backups to 3rd-party NAS devices; though officially supported backups would be up to negotiations between Apple and 3rd-party vendors.