Promise Pegasus R6 with Thunderbolt. Holy Wow.

While we wait on a full review from Anandtech, I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring.  If anyone is wondering how fast ThunderBolt is, I can definitvely answer.  ThunderBolt is really fast.  Absurdly fast.  I've migrated my home directory over to a 12 terabyte Promise Pegasus R6 and it's unbelievable.  Booting from a SSD and accessing your home folder from a 6 disk array over a dual channel 10 gigabit interconnect is quite quick.  Really amazing.

I left the R6 set as a RAID 5 volume.  I can only imagine what it would do as a RAID 0.  Here's a run from QuickBench:

 

It's a good looking piece of hardware as well, and nicely matches my iMac.

 

All that over a single cable.  Amazing.

SSD + HD = The best of both worlds?

It had to be done.  My computer felt slow despite the fact that my desktop computer was an overpowered Mac Pro from 2 years ago stuffed with too many cores and too much RAM for the work I do on it.  My MacBook Air, iPad and even iPhone felt so much more fluid for day-to-day use than the Mac Pro despite all of them having much less computational horsepower.  Sure the Mac Pro was a beast when I was encoding video or building a Keynote presentation full of large assets, but booting, launching apps or even switching between tasks was noticeably slower than even my iPhone.

The Mac Pro was held back by a mechanical hard drive.  Every other device I use had an SSD, and I was spoiled.  Only the Mac Pro had to wait for a little part to move and search across a spinning disk to find information.  I'd held out though for capacity.  My data set won't fit on any contemporary SSD.  My solution has been to keep my working data on Dropbox, and use my Mac Pro for archival storage.  I have a pretty extensive Backup/replication strategy (Most data replicated across two computers and Dropbox, both computers backing up to Time Machine, both computers backing up to Crashplan).

Then Apple released new iMacs and several points caught my eye.  First was quad-core i7 option at 3.4 GHz.  The next was a 2GB Radeon 6970M.  Finally was the option to get a 256 GB SSD with a 2 TB HD.  I decided to get the iMac and move my home directory to the HD while keeping the OS and applications on the SSD.  Then to boost speed a little more, I symlinked some directories back to the SSD from my home directory (~/Application Support, ~/Caches, etc.).

The end result is the most responsive computing device I've ever used.  Day-to-day tasks are fast and responsive, but there is still ample CPU for more demanding tasks when needed.  The speed, capacity and massive display make my other devices seem like compromises necessary for mobility–and I'm finally using my Macs more than my iPad again.

Ah, progress.

09/09/09 & Apple's Formula for Rock 'N Roll

There's a wealth of quality reporting and analysis surrounding today's announcements from Apple, so I won't waste time writing an inferior summary.  However, there is one aspect of Apple's announcements that struck me and I haven't seen it discussed elsewhere.

Think back to Apple before Steve Jobs returned to the company.  The company had lost its innovative spirit.  The Mac suffered from an OS strategy that was lost in the wilderness and hardware that did little to advance the differences between Macs and other PCs.  Apple was coasting on the amazing innovations it pioneered in the early 80s.  Certainly, Apple tried to break the mold with break through projects like the Newton, but the implementation of those concepts weren't viable in the marketplace.  Apple was either ahead of the curve, or botched the implementation.

Then Steve came back.

Apple followers found themselves on a wild ride.  Apple found a tight focus in its OS strategy and began to make major strides quickly.  Simultaneously, we watched as the hardware became candy colored, then grey and white, then all white and finally aluminum.  In all those transitions, radical changes in the appearance of Mac models and lines were a regular occurrence.  Think about the evolution of the iMac from a friendly bubble, to a sunflower, to a picture frame on a stand and finally an aluminum frame on a stand.  The pace of change was dizzying.

All this iteration created products that increasingly resonated in the marketplace.  Apple capitalized on the major ground shift to OS X and Intel, and wrapped it in an industrial design that continues to stand above its competition.  Sales continue to rise, as does the quality of Apple's hardware.  Each years product is more enjoyable to use than the last's.

This comes with a price.  Mac hardware announcements are not as exciting as they were 5 or 10 years ago.  That's not to say the products are bad: I'm absolutely in love with the MacBook Air I'm typing on now--but this MacBook Air is an awful lot like the last MacBook Air I had.  Mac Industrial Design has become largely iterative and evolutionary.

It's clear the iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone are reaching a similar place.  The form factor of these products is so successful, and the process of manufacturing these products so effective that iteration is all Apple needs to stay in front of competitors.

Apple is still in the revolution business.  The iPhone didn't exist 5 years ago.  The iPod didn't exist 10 years ago, and nether did the iTunes Store.  Apple is in a place where they have the ability to invent category disrupting products, which they follow with a series of rapid, massive revision followed by a mature cycle of refinement and iteration.  It's an amazing business model, and certainly benefits me as a customer.

The nerd in me always hungers for that category buster though.  I love to watch the rules of the game change.

PS - Home Sharing is awesome. 

Boot Camp, WPA2 and Windows XP

I'm hoping Google will index this and save the next poor sap who runs into this issue a few minutes of frustration.

If you install Windows XP SP2 on a Mac via Boot Camp and then attempt to connect to a WiFi network that uses WPA2 authentication, it will not work.  XP SP2 does not have support for WPA2 without a hotfix which is found here.

:)