Read/write speeds almost doubled.

A while back I explained some of the benefits of using a Solid State Drive in your computer. While SSDs remain very expensive, if restricted to running the operating system and applications, plus acting as a scratch disk for Photoshop and Lightroom, they make a lot of sense. Applications load faster, cached internet pages load faster, operating heat falls. Still, large data storage is best done on traditional Hard Disk Drives as the economics are favorable. A 1tB HDD runs $90. Two 480 gB SSD run ten times that.

And I do not accept that SSDs are ‘more reliable’. We have decades of data on HDDs which allow rational analysis of failure risk. We have no such data volumes on SSDs. The fact that you can drop an SSD on concrete and it will likely survive is irrelevant to the risk discussion in practical use. Meanwhile we are seeing ludicrous manufacturer claims of 2 million hours Mean Time Between Failures. That’s 228.3 years. And you tested that how, exactly? Make me Treasury Secretary and I’ll balance the budget in 6 months, too.

Over the past year or two SATA 3 drives have become increasingly common. Sure you may need to upgrade your motherboard or computer, but they offer twice the data transfer rates on paper of the earlier SATA 2 drives. This applies whether the drive is SSD or HDD. An alternative, if your motherboard has a short slot available, is to add a SATA 3 adapter card and plug the SATA 3 drive, in an external enclosure, into the card:

When a friend alerted me to an Amazon special on SanDisk SSDs, the price reduced from $230 to $120 for a 120gB SATA 3 version, I snapped one up. I have since seen them as low as $98.

I popped the drive in my Aluratek external drive cradle, a device which has paid for itself in time saved over and over, and after formatting used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the new Sandisk SSD from my regular Intel SATA 2 SSD inside the HackPro. This Hackintosh was upgraded a while back with a Sandy Bridge CPU and the related motherboard upgrade came with SATA 3 drive sockets.

A few minutes later the Sandisk was swapped with the Intel SSD inside the Hackster and after restarting I ran some tests.

First you want to check it is being recognized as a SATA 3 drive – meaning you are looking for a ‘Negotiated Link Speed’ of 6 gb/s in System Profiler (“About this Mac”):

The new SSD is correctly reported as 6gb/s.

Contrast this with the Intel SATA 2 SSD:

Having confirmed that the drive is connected to the correct socket on the motherboard (there are also SATA 2 sockets, so a check is essential), and making sure the motherboard’s BIOS was set to AHCI, I ran the disk test utility Xbench. As I live in the real world, not a flaky marketing-sponsored ‘test lab’, I kept all my usual apps running when doing this test – Mail, Safari, Firefox, Finder, Temperature Monitor, NetNewsWire and so on. Here are the results:

Restarting from the Intel SSD SATA 2 backup drive, with identical content, I ran Xbench again:

That’s a 60% overall speed gain, and a 79% speed gain in Uncached Random Read speeds – which would apply when an application is first loaded, for example.

How about a traditional SATA 2 3gb/s 1tb HDD, like the 7200 rpm Samsungs inside the HackPro?

Night and day, as you might expect.

I tend to distrust subjective tests – the sort which culminate in nonsense like “It feels faster” – as they are mostly polluted with confirmation bias. You just paid for it so it has to be better, right? Still, for pages I visit frequently on the web, I can confirm that the speed with which such cached pages load is noticeably faster. Does LR load faster? Maybe. It’s not easy to tell the difference between 4 seconds and 3. Same for PS CS5.

So what is the optimal drive topology? If you tinker with OS upgrades and hacks as I do, the two SSDs – boot and backup – make sense, especially when you blow it! The boot drive should be SATA 3 for fastest operation, the backup can be SATA 2 if it’s cheaper – no need to have fast backups. Alternatively, use a SATA 2 HDD notebook drive as the backup for the boot disk. Small ones run $70, a modest saving. Then keep your data – picture files, movies, etc. – on inexpensive large HDDs, in redundant pairs and be sure to also maintain an offsite backup.

Anyone contemplating a new computer, or building/upgrading a Hackintoh, should look seriously at SATA 3 drives. Apple, the self-proclaimed great imnovator, just added SATA 3 to its MacBook Air and Pro machines, a year after the competition. 2011 and later iMacs need a firmware upgrade to run SATA 3; you are out of luck on older machines. Meanwhile, SATA 3 remains notable for its absence from the MacPro, despite the $5,000 price tag. Amazing.

SSD technology will eventually obsolete HDDs, but don’t hold your breath. The price is not coming down especially quickly.

What about using that SATA 2 Intel SSD removed from the HackPro? Easy. It found a willing home in the Hack Mini, the machine which replaced one of the worst computers ever made by Apple, the Mac Mini, a machine which doubles as a toaster. The Hack Mini is now faster than ever and happy as can be. As for USB3 or SATA 3 on the Mac Mini, forget about it. Maybe next year? The Hack Mini, of course, has both.

To learn about TRIM (garbage management for SSDs) and how to enable it, click here. Arrogant Apple only enables TRIM by default for favored vendors, and San Disk is not one of those, so you have to go the extra mile.

MacBook Air 2012 update:

The 2012 MBA with its 128Gb SSD marginally improves on the SanDisk SSD, above. here are the results:

Xbench for the 2012 MacBook Air.

An update.

After spiking mightily, with prices doubling owing to the floods in Thailand which took out a sizable chunk of the world’s production facilities, Hard Disk Drive prices are coming down again. While my main Hackintosh uses Solid State Drives for the OS and applications, SSDs still remain prohibitively expensive for high volume data storage. Meanwhile, HDD technology refuses to die and just gets cheaper.

Scanning Amazon US I see 3.5″ indicative prices as follows:

• 500mB – $70-90
• 1tB – $100-120
• 2tB – $120-140
• 3tB – $140-160

Current Amazon US 1tB HDD listings.

Now there are drives and there are drives. In the various specs you will find 5400rpm, 7200rpm and 10000rpm, 3gb/s SATA II and 6gb/s SATA III, 32mb and 64mb buffers. You will also find hybrid drives with small SSD front ends and traditional high volume spinning discs doing the heavy lifting. The latter only make sense if you access the same apps (though it’s much more effective to simply buy more RAM and keep the apps loaded all the time) or recurring data frequently; otherwise, the price premium does not solve. And, unless you must have the portability afforded by 2.5″ notebook drives, these also make no sense for high volume storage at home where portability is not an issue, but price is. Further, 2.5″ notebook drives do not come in the higher capacities available in the larger 3.5″ clunkers.

Here’s my experience using a Hackintosh with a current motherboard, a machine superior in most regards to the current, and rather dated, MacPro:

• 6gb/s transfer rates make for the biggest performance increase. I have found that the promise of twice as fast read/write times is largely met in my Hackintosh compared to an older 3gb/s HDD.
• Bigger buffers – 64mb rather than 32mb – make a difference in streaming video applications where the larger buffer mostly obviates occasional pauses for refilling of the buffer with drives in external enclosures.
• Rotational speed makes the least difference. The 7200rpm premium is hard to justify in photo processing applications. Save on your power bill and use 5400rpm if possible.
• 10,000 rpm drives make no sense – costly, noisy, power hungry and with high failure rates.

If your PC or Hack’s motherboard supports 6gb/s connections – as the latest motherboards mostly do – then a 6gb/s drive for internal mounting is the best price/performance option. You get a fast, hardwired motherbard connection and no need for an external enclosure. I still use 1tB drives as the areal storage density is low so the technology is fairly remote from the ‘bleeding edge’. However, 2tB drives have been around a while now and while failure rates are slightly higher, they are more cost effective. At this time I am avoiding anything over 2tB. Most external USB enclosures support up to 2 x 2tB HDDs, but not 3tB.

For external storage eSATA is the way to go or use a USB3 external enclosure – not easy to find – which supports 6gb/s drives.

So its’s good to see that HDDs are becoming affordable once more. They remain an attractive option until SSDs start falling in price, something that is happening at a glacial pace.

Finally, for aficionados of Nikon’s latest, the D800, where file sizes can rise to 75mB, that gets you 13,000 files or so per 1tB. So the upgrade to a couple of 2tB drives should likely be part and parcel of your upgrade to a sensor few realistically need, and even fewer can fully exploit.

Horribly overpriced.

Let me preface this piece by saying that I own the previous generation MacMini with the Core2Duo CPU. It does service as a movie file server and has attached to it, using USB, 10 tB of HDDs containing movies. It’s small, quiet and fits in easily with the other electronics required for decent pictures and sound with a modern TV, though the poorly engineered slot loading DVD drive needs constant cleaning. However, as a stock computer for photo processing I can’t think of a worse choice. (OK, I can, but this writer does not use Windows).

This piece was prompted by a friend who asked whether the MacMini is a good choice for photo and video processing. The short answer? Not remotely.

The Mini fails on many fronts. The heat management is awful. The very last thing I would ever do with mine is use it to rip DVDs or compress movies using Handbrake for the iPad, having tried it just once. Try it on a Mini or any iMac, for that matter. Fire up the (free) Temperature Monitor from Bresink Software, invoke the history chart window and watch the CPU temperature go ballistic from some 105F (ambient) to 160F+ when ripping or compressing. That’s very close to the temperature limit of the CPU used. Even to get the ambient down to 105F I use a fan utility to spool up the pathetic single fan – there’s no room in the box for more – over the inadequately low stock setting.

Try and add more memory (easier in the latest Mini) or a larger HDD, and I have done both, and you have to be pretty smart with tools not to damage something when you crack the case open. It’s obviously the last thing Apple wants you to do given their default ‘form over function’ design philosophy.

The latest Mini addresses only the ease of RAM replacement (now easy, through a cover in the base) and use with SDHC cards. It has a reader, albeit inaccessibly placed in the rear. It now uses an Intel Core i5 (or i7 for another $100) CPU but both are significantly detuned, likely owing to heat management problems. The Mini’s i5 runs at 2.5gHz (3.3gHz is stock if you buy the CPU in a box) and the i7 manages a poor 2.7gHz (3.6gHz stock). The stock, boxed CPUs can be overclocked to 3.6gHz and 3.8gHz without voiding the warranty, if you buy the ‘K’ unlocked models for a $20 premium.

Not that you even need to overclock the i5/i7 if you make a Hackintosh. The i3 built for me by buddy FU Steve runs as fast as the i5 in the Mini.

Short of buying a MacPro ($$$$$) your only choice for robustness, ease of maintenance, proper cooling and reliability is a DIY Hackintosh. The iMac is not an alternative. It comes with a glossy screen which cannot be properly profiled for photographic use, owing to the restricted gamut. Both features help the machine pop when displayed in the Apple Store but neither does anything for photo processing veracity. Further, the iMac is every bit as heat challenged as the Mini (I have lost three iMacs from overheated GPUs so it’s not like I am making this up). But unless your time is worth so much that you don’t care (in which case you should buy a MacPro) just compare prices.

Here’s the Mini with 8gB of RAM and a 500gB HDD. You need the external DVD drive as the new Mini has none – go figure. You need the DVI adapter to actually make a regular monitor work.

That’s a whopping $1,105 and you still have to add a mouse.

Now compare that to my HP10 Hackintosh. This runs an i3 CPU (as fast as the de-clocked i5 in the Mini), comes with a way superior dual-DVI Nvidia 430 graphics card (compared with the poor integrated one used in the Mini which shares its space and heat output with the CPU with which it is integrated) and has enough cooling for a small block V8:

• Intel i3 CPU – $124
• Coolermaster 212 Plus CPU cooler – $28
• Gigabyte H67M-D2-B3 motherboard – $100
• 8gB Corsair 1333mHz DDR3 RAM (same spec as the Mini) – $60
• EVGA Nvidia GT430 graphics card with discrete fan – $64
• Coolermaster 371 case with case fan – $40
• Thermaltake 430 watt power supply – $41
• Kensington wired keyboard – $38
• 500gB 7200rpm 6gb/s HDD – $40
• Sony DVD reader/writer – $40 (two @ $20)
• IOGear Bluetooth dongle – $12
• Broadcomm wireless card and PCIe-MiniPCIe adapter – $40
• OS Pussy, err Lion – $30
• SDHC card reader – free with many SDHC cards -$0

Total for that little lot? $657.

Expandability – any number of internal SSDs or HDDs can be added in minutes. The i5 or i7 CPU is a drop in replacement for the i3 used. The graphics card supports two DVI-D single link or dual link monitors (meaning you can use two 27″ or 30″ whoppers with any dual-link DVI cable). Heat rise when ripping or compressing a DVD? From 84F ambient to 115F – compare that to the 160F+ in a Mini or iMac.

Assembly time – 1 hour. 2 hours if this is your first Hackintosh. Lion installation – 1-2 hrs with the free modern tools now broadly available and easy to use. And this will not only last you, if anything breaks a replacement is 24hrs away by mail order, with no part costing over $124.

Impossible to cool properly under stress. The latest MacMini, dismantled by iFixit.

Here, by contrast, is a CPU temperature chart from my i3 Hackintosh, ripping and compressing a full length DVD – a real stress test:

Stress test – Coolermaster 212+ CPU radiator used.

If you want to save $28 and use the stock Intel CPU fan shipped with the i3 CPU, your CPU temperature will rise to 149F, which has to be a false economy. $28 for the large and efficient Coolermaster 212+ radiator to keep it really cool? I can’t think of a better way to buy reliability and longevity.

The Mini is the worst possible choice for a hard working photographer who stresses his gear. Buy a MacPro or build your own. And if you need to do heavy movie compression, this is the machine for the job. Yes, the Hackintosh comes in a big box, enough to hold many Minis, but why would you care? Do you want looks or function?

If you really want to try and spend as much as Apple will charge you for its compromised MacMini, you will end up with a rig sporting an overclocked i7 CPU, a better motherboard (the one I use above does not support overclocking), a sexier box and performance 50% better. But you will fail on the spending front as you will still have $200 left over. Hey, it’s your money.

What is your time worth? The true comparison is between the $657 Hackintosh here and a like-spec’d MacPro which runs $2,973. Assuming it takes four hours to build the Hackintosh for a saving of $2,316, that figures to $579/hr, or an annual income of $1.2mm. So if you are making $1.2mm or more annually from your labor after tax, buy a MacPro as your time is worth too much to waste it on computer building. And congratulations – you are in the top 1% of US plutocrats who control 50% of the country’s wealth – a statistic last reached in 1929 ….

What use is the Mini? For light processing, web surfing and the like, it’s fine. None of these stress the Mini’s poor thermal dynamics. For use as a movie server or for accessing services like Amazon VOD which are not available on the AppleTV, it’s fine, especially as the latest model adds an HDMI socket, making connection to a big screen TV easy. But as a desktop, even for light use, it’s a poor choice. By the time you add a half decent display and a DVD player to the $600 base model you are getting close to the $1,000 base iMac in price, with inferior performance.

Good times.

The competence and performance of the desktop Mac – or Hackintosh in my case – has never been better. The price, it seems to me, cannot go much lower, with even Macs being more than price competitive with comparably equipped PCs.

My two year old Hackster, HP1, marches on unperturbed regardless of what I throw at it.

Play. HP1 with three Dell 2209W 1680 x 1050 IPS displays shows our son in LR3 and PS CS5.
The red phone is a hot line to the gutless wonder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.
Garish Dell logos on monitor bezels blacked out with a marking pen.

If there’s a grumble it’s that Dell – or anyone else for that matter – is clueless about making display stands tall enough for the preferred operating height, which means the display top should be more or less at eye level. iMacs are quite the worst in this regard. Hence the three reams of paper in the picture. HP1’s technology may be dated – Core2Quad overclocked, Nvidia 9800GTX+ 512mB graphics – but I can asssure you it lacks nothing in performance or reliability.

FU Steve’s latest ‘build’ for me is the HP10, using the latest i3 Sandybridge Intel CPU and a tremendous EVGA GT430 dual DVI-D graphics card with 1024mB of memory. No sooner was FU’s back turned than I clandestinely opened the case, dropped in another 4gB of RAM in the one open memory slot and saw Geekbench performance soar 6% past that of HP1! Never one to miss an opportunity to tinker, I invested another $130 in a cheap Acer display and $15 for a wall mount, and before you could say ‘iMacs suck’ the GT430 HP10 was happily driving two displays.

If there’s anything remarkable about HP10, other than the blistering performance, it is the incredibly low cost. Cheap displays are used here as color fidelity is not exactly paramount in the money management business, as long as you can distinguish red from green!

Work. HP10 with cheap Hyundai and Acer 1920 x 1080 displays,
which show the crooked game that is America’s capital markets.

Either rig is a photographer’s dream machine, and you really do not need more performance. Only heavy duty gamers need faster CPUs or more GPU performance.

A note on DVI single ink and dual link display connectors:

A single link DVI connector supports a resolution up to 1920×1200, and a dual link can support up to 2560×1600. The latter is generally found on 27″ and 30″ computer displays.

A reader Comment to FU Steve’s recent piece on the state-of-the-art in today’s Hackintosh suggests a few words are in order regarding connectors for modern LCD computer displays.

When FU spec’d the machine, he purposefully chose the EVGA GT430 display card which comes with two DVI dual link and one mini-HDMI socket. DVI dual link is the standard used by large 27″ and 30″ monitors to drive their huge pixel counts. It does not mean that you need two connectors on your graphics card. It does mean you need a DVI dual link graphics card and cable, not a DVI single link version of either. Most modern graphics cards support DVI dual link and you can immediately see the difference in the pin pattern on the connectors:

Single and dual link DVI connectors compared.

In practice, you may as well buy dual link DVI cables for all your connector needs as they can be used down the road if you get a 27″ or 30″ display. The premium over single link is negligible. A dual link DVI cable will fit either a single or dual link DVI graphics card or DVI monitor. For example, in the case of HP10 which uses two inexpensive 21.5″ 1920 x 1080 widescreen single link DVI monitors, one is connected to the GT430 card using a DVI dual link cable (which I had to buy) and the other is connected with a DVI single link cable because it came included with the monitor. The first cable will work fine with a 27″ or 30″ display, whereas the second is useless and would have to be replaced.

So, bottom line, the GT430 used in FU’s state-of-the-art Hackintosh (and in HP10) can support two 27″ or 30″ displays so long as a dual link DVI connecting cable is used for each. One cable per monitor, one socket on the GT430 per monitor. Two 30″ displays …. Hmmm!

The end of the desktop era.

The latest changes to my Hackintosh, which now see it once more delivering performance comparable to the best top-of-the-line Macs at no additional cost, raise the question of what the future holds.

The original design brief for the Hackintosh, which FU Steve built for me, was reliability, with a primary focus on proper cooling of components. Secondary requirements were speed and expandability. At the time of construction, two years ago, I anticipated the HackPro might enjoy a five year useful life. I am now inclined to think that was an underestimate.

If you compare the specs of Intel’s current i3/i5/i7 CPUs, which succeeded the Core2Duo and Core2Quad design (still made and still popular in PCs) the main difference is not in speed but in power consumption. The latest graphics cards barely improve on the Nvidia 9800GTX+. Intel is bowing to the trend which favors mobile computing, meaning laptops, where battery power use is important. Low power consumption CPUs with integrated GPUs add more value than greater speed. And adding more cores is futile. Absent some exotic statistical math applications, plus super speed weather/military computers and the like, multi-core CPUs are wasted on what we photographers use daily. For that matter, four cores are largely wasted, poor application programming failing to make effective use of the available parallel processing potential. Don’t believe me – run Lightroom on a 2 core then a 4 core CPU. Notice any difference?

Since the HackPro was built, iOS and Android, cell and tablet operating systems, have taken the world by storm. While nowhere near as fast as desktop/laptop OSs, they add a whole range of capabilities – fast AppStore downloads, huge app selections, touch interfaces, great UIs – which are quickly migrating the desktop and laptop to the category of mature technologies. The return on incremental investment in these latter technologies falls daily, as Mobile is where the money is. Four years ago Apple introduced the iPhone. Today the iPhone and iPad account for three quarters of the company’s sales! The consequences of this trend are that desktop development will slow to a crawl and prices will cease falling as sales volumes fall. Sure, there will always be demand from artists, scientists, cinematographers and photographers for heavy duty iron but that population is minuscule.

Desptop/laptop OSs have also peaked. Windows 7 (I have not used it so this is apocryphal) is reported to be reliable (a twenty year miracle in the making) and speedy, and OS Lion may well be the last major version of OS X, though after using Lion for a while it’s clear that the changes are very minor ones in UI cosmetics and add little benefit for the working stiff. You aren’t going to make your machine any faster by installing Lion, that much is certain, though users ought to be grateful for an absence of code bloat and forced hardware updates, for the most part.

Desktop applications are likewise mature. Adobe isn’t about to fix the execrable UI of Photoshop when it has a static audience which will dutifully upgrade every 18 months for minor improvements at the margin, using corporate money. And they can’t add too many of PS’s features to the far friendlier Lightroom for fear of cannibalizing their cash cow. But I am happy to wager that they are working like stink on mobile versions of their apps. Sure, some apps like Pixelmator will capture amateur users who (rightly) balk at CS5’s ridiculous price, but the design pro has zero incentive to save his employer money or to risk his career on an unknown quantity, no matter how good.

Dinosaurs. The HackPro and its patrician brother.

The biggest benefits to desktop users in recent years have come from flash storage Solid State Drives and improving broadband, both technologies being pushed to improve by burgeoning demand for mobile devices. Intel’s Light Peak data transfer technology (Apple calls it Thunderbolt) will increase wired data transfer rates ten fold while cutting the number of connecting cables. LCD monitor technology has reached price-quality equilibrium. Who needs higher definition or larger screens than what those already afforded at reasonable cost today? What the world needs is faster broadband and better batteries, not faster CPUs or better displays.

I look at our 9 year old son. I would far rather he learned the iPad, maybe with the eventual addition of a keyboard, than an iMac. If he wants a big screen display it’s there at the touch of an icon, no wires needed. Wikipedia has obsoleted space gobbling encyclopedias and access is instantaneous. His music is accessible anywhere, he can print anywhere (if he even cares what a printer actually is) and even he can lug around the modest weight of a tablet all day. He has access to millions of books and thousands of newspapers at no weight or storage cost and his tools for learning math and spelling are all there at a touch. If he gets serious about taking pictures, all the processing power he will ever need will be on his tablet in a year or two and the camera will likely be a part of that tablet too. And I will be making sure that one of the developed world’s worst educational systems – it’s called US schooling – will not stand in his way.

So why force him to learn yesterday’s technology?

Those magnificent dinosaurs, the desktop computers of our time, will soldier on in dwindling numbers for a generation yet, after which time they will be so much landfill.