Category Archives: Hackintosh

The computer for the best of us

SSDs and TRIM

Hackintosh, Hardware

Easily added.

Snow Leopard users should be aware of Apple’s latest sleight of hand.

TRIM – garbage management for SSDs which maintains their performance – has been added in Snow Leopard 10.6.8, the last version of Snow Leopard before Lion comes to market in July, 2011.

But that’s not all good news. You see Apple, in its greed for every penny they can squeeze from buyers of its overpriced jewelry passing as computer hardware, has made sure that TRIM support will only be available if you bought your computer with its SSD from Apple. Meaning you were well and truly hosed down at a 100% premium compared to what you could have bought an SSD for yourself. Or, worse luck, maybe that SSD option was simply unavailable when you bought your hardware so now you are forced to use an aftermarket SSD to upgrade. No TRIM for you, my lad. So much for backward compatibility and planned obsolescence.

Apple has made it extremely easy to replace HDDs in MacBook Pros and MacPros (and extremely hard in iMacs and Minis) but if you slot that nice new SSD into your MBP/MacPro/Mini, TRIM will not work. Upgrading your HDD to an SSD in your MBP, a plug-and-play operation which does not invalidate the warranty, is the single best thing for the performance of your laptop. However, when you do so, this is what OS 10.6.8’s System Profiler will report:

No TRIM for you, sucker.

Mercifully, there are many smart people out there who believe in freedom of speech and refuse to be stolen from. Hop over to the good people at Groths and you can download their utility and have TRIM up and running on your aftermarket SSD in no time at all. My SSDs are recent Intel X25-M 120gB models, and this fix works perfectly on both, after a restart.

As usual with these things, I suggest you try this on a bootable backup drive first, to be on the safe side. After you complete the installation, your System Profiler->Serial-ATA->SSD should look like this, and your SSD’s performance will be enhanced for the long term:

TRIM enabled on the HackPro.

As you can see, the fix uses no space, merely modifying existing files, speaking loudly to Apple’s increasingly cynical attitude toward its customers.

If you have been using your SSD without TRIM for a while, as I have, Lifehacker has information on how to clean it up here.

Another SSD for the HackPro

Hackintosh

Gearing up for Lion.

As OS X Lion will likely involve the usual amount of experimentation to get it working properly on the HackPro, I have added a fourth drive to the computer and its second SSD, so it now contains two SSDs and two HDDs.

The SSDs act as OS and application drives (boot and back-up) whereas the HDDs contain data and back-up data. They also contain OS Snow Leopard as EyeOne Match, the profiling utility for my EyeOne colorimeter, will not work with Lion.

In addition to having an SSD for experimenting with Lion, I also gain a super-fast back-up boot drive. On monthly testing of the HDDs as boot drives I have been increasingly struck by just how slow these are when booted from. After four trouble free months with my first Intel SSD it made sense to add a second. For the test phase I will partition it into two partitions, using Disk Utility; one will contain a straight clone of the existing SSD boot and application drive, and Lion, once released, will reside on the other until fully debugged. Thereafter both will be converted to Lion and Snow Leopard will remain on the HDDs for use with EyeOne Match.

The second SSD will continue to act as a low risk testbed for any new software changes or upgrades.

This is how things will look:

Drive topology after adding the second SSD to HackPro.

I strongly recommend you add an SSD to your work computer. Once you have experienced the speed there is no going back. I paid $230 for each Intel X25-M 120gB SSD.

The HackPro with two SSDs installed.

The incremental heat output and current draw of the second SSD are so low that no additional cooling precautions need be taken in the exceptionally well ventilated Antec Sonata III case with its generously spec’d 500 watt power supply. Installation, which means attaching the SSD to the provided mounting plate and the plate to the Antec’s slide in carrier, plus the connection of power and data cables took FU Steve all of twenty minutes. Carbon Copy Cloner took 27 minutes to clone the existing SSD Boot drive to the new backup SSD, and it needed but two more minutes to verify that the backup was bootable and to add the backup job (Boot->SSD Bak) to Carbon Copy Cloner’s list of automated, nightly backups. You really don’t want to forget that last step!

Partitioning:

As the new backup SSD will also be used as a test bed for OS Lion, to be released next month, I first partitioned it into 90gB and 30gB partitions, using Disk Utility. The latter partition, named ‘Lion Test’, at 30gB, will be more than large enough for OS and selected application testing.

Partitioning the SSD Bak drive to make space for OS Lion.

TRIM:

TRIM is the software code which helps manage garbage on an SSD drive. Apple’s just enabled it in OS Snow Leopard 10.6.8 (the last release before Lion) and it will be included in Lion. At this time the OS will only permit TRIM to be used on Apple installed SSDs. Let’s hope that changes, as many Mac users will be replacing the HDD in their MacBook Pro with an aftermarket SSD to avail themselves of the enhanced speed and lower power consumption. Even if Apple does not step up to the plate here, hacks already exist to make TRIM in Lion work with non-Apple installed SSDs.

Meanwhile, is there anything useful to be divined by comparing the space on the 3 month old SSD in my HackPro with the newly installed backup SSD?

Here’s are the drives inside HackPro as reported on the Desktop:

HackPro drives before partitioning SSD Bak.

In the case of the SSD drive pair, the base drive reports a little more space than the backup one, but not enough to make any difference. Both the backup drives, which include a full Snow Leopard OS, are bootable. So after three months of intense use of the first SSD (top of the above screen snap) there seems to be negligible difference in available space, suggesting that the absence of TRIM has made no material difference. However, be assured I will be looking into adding TRIM support once Lion is installed and will be explaining how to do that in these pages.

Update June 2012: For data on the newer, faster SATA 3 6gd/s SSDs, click here.

Wi-fi dongles

Hackintosh, Hardware

Cheap speed.

The location of my Hackintosh makes it uneconomical to run wired broadband from the Airport Extreme router in the adjacent room, so when I built the machine I installed a PCI-E wireless card to receive wireless. This card emulates the Airport card in Macs and works natively through the System Preferences->Network pane. Yes, a lot of brain cells were destroyed trying to find the right driver to make this work!

The other day, wanting to add a little more computing power to my office, it occurred to me that I had an older MSI Barebone in the closet. This inexpensive computer had been used as a media center but the poky Intel Atom CPU and Intel GMA 950 GPU struggled with routing movies, resulting in stuttering. So I replaced the Barebone with a MacMini and the problem went away, owing to the faster CPU/GPU in the Mini. The Barebone was consigned to the closet – it has negligible resale value.

However, for my use – streaming stock quotes – the Barebone would be ideal. The only snag is that it had no wireless capability and as it had been hacked to run OS X Leopard adding wireless would be tricky as there are no expansion slots in the machine.

Now my Apple Airport Extreme router is not the latest dual band version. It can deliver 802-11n in either shared b/g/n mode at 2.4gHz or n mode only at 5 gHz. I cannot use the less interference-prone 5gHz mode (where baby monitors, cordless phones, etc, do not venture) as that makes my older iPhone unworkable and also disables the HackPro whose internal card runs at 2.4gHz only, albeit in n mode.

So when I started shopping around for a device to add wireless to the Barebone, I limited my search to 2.4gHz devices, as I could not use 5gHz because of these limitations, and I did not want to spend another $180 to upgrade to the latest dual band auto-switching Airport Extreme router. I bought one of these, having owned one ages ago to add n mode to an old Mac iBook:

The Newer Technology n mode wireless dongle. Click the picture for MacSales’s site.

I plugged it in to the Barebone and, voila, after installing the driver (I downloaded it from NT’s site rather than using the older one on the provided disk) I was up and running.

The next thing was to run Speedtest.net on the Barebone and …. blow me down …. but the dongle was far faster than the Hackintosh with the internal card.

Ping/Download/Upload measurements were as follows (Ping, or latency, should be as low as possible, the others as high as possible):

MSI Barebone: 71/7.6/1.2
Hackintosh: 24/6.5/1.5

Both machines are in the same location.

So now, getting ambitious, I switched off Airport in the Hackintosh and plugged in the Newer Technology Dongle. Wow!

Hackintosh with NT dongle: 24/9.1/1.5 (The maximum download speed possible is 10.0 with my service)
Hackintosh with internal PCI-E card: 24/6.5/1.5

So the download speed was 40% higher with the dongle in the Hackster than with the PCI-E internal card!

Finally, I went to the MacMini which is hard wired to the cable modem which pipes broadband to the home:

MacMini hardwired: 26/8.6/1.3

So the Hackster + dongle on wireless, in a remote location, was faster than a hard wired MacMini!

These dongles run their own software and do not use the Airport app. In the past they deposited an ugly icon in your dock but the latest version of the software now places a discrete Ralink icon in the status bar, thus:

Click the icon and you get:

The Ralink software supports WPA2 secure encryption, even if it’s not pretty to look at:

All those disparate wireless sources reflect the additional Airport Express wireless extenders throughout the home, and the Virgin one is the MiFi portable 3G wireless gadget, of which more here. ‘2WIRE665’ is the router provided by AT&T. Fire up System Preferences->Network and you will see both the Airport-emulation PCI-E card inside the Hackintosh and the external dongle, identified below as ‘802 11 n WLAN’. In practice, the slower of the two – Airport – is switched off and the Hackintosh enjoys the faster speed conferred by the $30 dongle. You can save the Profile for your network, thus obviating the need to enter your password every time you reboot or restart. As I never switch off my desktop computers, it’s not an issue for me.

Bottom Line? If you are OK with using 2.4gHz n mode wifi and want speed with a minimum of futzing about in your Hackintosh, or you want to add n mode to an older computer which has b/g mode only or has no wireless capability, plug in one of these NT dongles into an available USB port, download the software from NT’s site and off you go. It protrudes some 2 3/4 inches. If that does not work, plug it into the provided cradle and connect the cradle to your Mac using the provided USB cable.

Snow Leopard 10.6.8 update – late June, 2011: The existing Ralink wireless utility fails to work after upgrading Snow Leopard from 10.6.7 to 10.6.8. However, the maker, Ralink, is on the ball, and you can find an updated version here – it’s the file named USB(RT2870 /RT2770 /RT3X7X /RT537X) and dated 6/21/2011. I had to try the installation twice before it worked and after rebooting all was fine again.

Intel improves its SSD

Hackintosh

Change continues at a hectic pace.

No sooner do I install a 120gB solid state boot/app Intel X25-M drive (SSD) in the HackPro than Intel announces many improvements and a price reduction. This message will likely be repeated often over the next few quarters and Intel is to be commended.

Intel SSD in the HackPro. Two 1 tB Samsung HDDs to the right.

Here’s what I got from Macworld’s lengthy piece on Intel’s latest:

  • 30% price drop
  • Sequential write speed more than doubled – holy moly!
  • Redundant chips included in case any of the main ones fail
  • Capacitors added so the write operation can be concluded if the power fails – wow!
  • Capacities up to 600gB – but at a price – $1,069
  • Despite the lowest industry failure rate of 1.4% in the current model, the new one aims to improve on that statistic, which is already far lower than for conventional HDDs.
  • Intel is putting its mouth where its money is and using these in its servers.

My advice? Wait for these to hit Amazon and rush out and get one. There’s simply no going back once you have used one, be it in your laptop or desktop computer. The new model is the ‘320M’. HDDs are to storage what film was to photography 10 years ago.

Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Hackintosh, OS X

The latest release.

Snow Leopard 10.6.7 came out yesterday, with bug fixes and security enhancements, and before you could say ‘Hackintosh’ I had it installed on the HackPro.

It’s worth the upgrade. Running in 64-bit mode here is the Geekbench (OS performance as reflected in CPU and RAM throughput – no disk factors, so the SSD I have recently installed is irrelevant to comparisons) report:

Snow Leopard 10.6.7

Here is 10.6.6 with the same configuration:

Snow Leopard 10.6.6

That’s 2.4% faster. Not enough to notice, but nice to know that the newer version is not the victim of performance drag from code bloat. The biggest component of the overall change is in the memory performance result which is 8.0% faster. Nice code optimization, Apple!

On the 2010 MacBook Air (mine is the 11″ with the base spec and minimum RAM) the change in speed is +5%. Once again, not noticeable but nice to know.