Category: Computer Hardware

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Mac Software Striping RAID Performance

The Mac OS includes software RAID options.  Using the striping option, you can double your storage and greatly improve your read/write performance.  But what is the true performance gain and is it worth doing?

Mac Pro

What you need

First, you need a Mac capable of holding at least 2 drives.  This is actually a problem for most Macs.  Only the Mac Pro is capable of that off the shelf.  The Mac Mini can be hacked to do so but it involves removing the DVD drive and soldering in a 2nd hard drive.  The system I used in this test is the latest entry-level Mac Pro from early 2009.

Second, you need another hard drive.  The Mac Pro can actually hold 4 but for the purposes of this test, I’m only adding 1. This Mac Pro comes with a 640GB Western Digital Caviar Blue so I purchased another identical to that.  It is best to have 2 identical drives when doing striping so that both drives can be fully used.  If you’re looking for Mac Mini drives, we recommend the 500GB Western Digital Scorpio Blue.

Backup original drive

In order to add the 2nd drive, you’ll need to fully backup your first drive so that you can restore it later.  When creating a RAID setup, the drives will be wiped clean.  If you already have a time machine backup, you can do a restore from that but I prefer using Disk Utility to do a backup and restore because it can create a fully bootable 100% identical backup that you can then restore from Disk Utility off of a Leopard boot disc.  Disk Utility doesn’t word things very well.  Both a backup and a restore are both under the Restore tab.  When you backup, you just do a restore from your Macintosh HD to your external backup drive.  If you want the backup to be bootable, be sure it is partitioned with a GUID Partition Table scheme under Options.

Add the drive

Now that your data is backed up, you can add your new drive.  In the Mac Pro, this is the quickest and easiest hard drive addition ever.  Simply unlatch the drive holders and slide one out.  There are 4 screws already in there waiting to go into the new drive.  Then you just slide in the new drive and that’s it.  If you’re using a Mac Mini, you’ll need to follow this Mac Mini upgrade guide.

Mac RAID

Create the RAID
Boot up the mac off of a Leopard disc by holding down C.  Choose your language and then you’ll be able to launch Disk Utility from the top menu.  Select one of the drives and go to the RAID tab.  Enter the RAID Set Name to be the standard drive name Macintosh HD.  Then drag both of your drives to the RAID set window.  Both will show up and show the combined storage based on your RAID type.  Mirroring is for a duplicate backup.  Striping is for performance and extra storage.  You can select Create to create the software RAID and it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

Restore

If you did a time machine backup, you can go through the standard Leopard install and choose restore from time machine.  If you did a disk utility backup, select your new Macintosh HD volume and go to the Restore tab.  Choose your external backup drive as your source and the Macintosh HD as the destination.  If you have a lot of data, this can take several hours.  If all went well, your system should now be able to boot off your new striping RAID Macintosh HD volume.

Performance

Now that we’ve got our striping RAID, how does it perform?  Using the Xbench disk test, the drive performance has gone from a score of 73 to 112.  That’s about a 53% improvement overall.  The test uses a variety of disk usage and this striping will perform differently based on exactly how the data is being used.  The biggest benefit will be for large files.  For example, if you use a virtual machine like VMware Fusion, the virtual RAM is written and read to the hard drive when you do a suspend or resume of the OS.  The result is that with a striping RAID volume, this feels about twice as fast. Striping also combines the drives so you double the capacity.

The down side

The biggest negative is that with 2 drives required to be working, we’ve doubled the likelihood of the Macintosh HD volume failing.  If just 1 drive breaks, the whole volume is lost.  Fortunately, Apple provides time machine which gives us a reliable and effortless backup.  If you do lose a drive, you’ll need to replace the bad drive and restart the RAID set from scratch and restore.  Another downside is that because this is a software RAID, it does use a little CPU which hardware RAID would not.  But a Mac Pro hardware RAID card will set you back $700 and the CPU usage is so small, I can’t even notice it when looking at Activity Monitor.

Conclusion

If you want to massively improve your disk performance, adding a second drive and creating a striping RAID set is a great choice.  This is easy in a Mac Pro but can be done on a Mac Mini with some work.  Just be sure you always have a time machine backup running in case your RAID fails.

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Music Studio Basics

Since I started working with music studios 20 years ago, I have seen what would have cost $100,000 with reel-to-reel tape equipment now come down to $10,000 with computers. Even more amazing is that home studios which used to rely on muddy sounding 4-track cassette recorders can now produce inexpensive high-fidelity recordings through a computer.

Music StudioAt Tech DC we have setup several music studios, from small one-mic setups for podcasters to 26 simultaneous channel studios to record entire live bands.

The first question to ask yourself when setting up a studio is Mac or PC. While great software exists for both platforms, the Mac is generally more popular for musicians.

While recordings can be done using a laptop, generally you will want a more powerful system in order to add more channels and effects. Effects like reverb can be very processor intensive. If you don’t have an isolation booth, remember to get a quiet computer so that it’s humming doesn’t leak into your recordings. This is another reason that Macs tend to be popular.

The software that records both audio and MIDI (keystrokes, pressures, pitch, etc.) is typcially referred to as a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). These include Logic, Cubase, ProTools, Cakewalk, and many others.

Logic & Logic Studio (Mac)

Logic was made by Emagic, then bought by Apple in 2002. It is my current favorite and the Studio version comes with loads of virtual instruments that can be played via MIDI.

Garage Band (Mac)

This is easy to use and included in the iLife suite. It is still very powerful and is built using the same engine as Logic.

Steinberg Cubase Software (PC & Mac)

Cubase is an excellent DAW for PC users.

Keyboard Controllers

Korg, Roland (and Edirol), Yamaha and others make keyboard controllers that can be used to control virtual instruments. Depending on the type of music, this can be very helpful. Virtual instruments come with DAWs and can be added on separately. They vary from unreal synthesizer sounds to professional pianos and organs.

Midi and Audio Ins and Outs

PreSonus of Louisiana makes the Firebox that is inexpensive, small, and perfect for very small studios, assuming that you need no more than a couple of Mic/Guitar inputs at a time. For larger studios, they make the 26 channel FireStudio.

M-Audio is a popular name in Audio/Midi interfaces as well as keyboard controllers. They have a 26 Channel ProFire Audio interface and a smaller 6 in X 10 out Firewire interface.

Mackie has long been the most popular brand for mixers. The mixers can be used to send mixed down audio to a small Audio I/O box like the Firebox. Mackie also sells digital Onyx mixers that send multi-channel audio to a computer.

Mark of the Unicorn is another old name in audio and currently sells the Traveler-mk3 audio interface.

Where to Buy Stuff around DC

There is no one perfect solution for everyone. You need to look at your budget, recording needs, and see what hardware and software you are comfortable using. Check out these stores to see the equipment in person.

Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center is my favorite local store for instruments and equipment. It has been here since 1958. Other local stores to visit are Guitar Centers in Falls Church, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, and Rockville, Maryland (formerly a Venemin’s Music).

Where to Buy Stuff Online and by Telephone

Sam Ash in multiple locations including Richmond, Virginia and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
zZounds in New Jersey
Music123 in Utah
Grandma’s in Albuquerque, New Mexico

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LCD Monitors trending towards 16:9 ratio?

Since HD began, widescreen TVs have been 16:9 ratio in screen size. But widescreen computer monitors have always been 16:10 ratio. If you’ve got a 24″ LCD, it is undoubtedly the 16:10 ratio of 1920×1200.  But just over the last few months, a few 16:9 ratio monitors have come out and many think this will start a new trend since computers will be used for HD content more and more.

An example of this new even wider ratio is the Samsung 2343BWX 23″ LCD.  It just came out in February and has a 2048×1152 16:9 resolution.  This has 3 major advantages. The first is that if you play HD video, it can completely fill up the screen since it matches the 16:9 ratio.  The second is that if you cut the screen in half, you’ve got 2 windows of the width 1024.  This happens to be the magic width that most web developers try to build for.  The result is that you could have 2 browser windows side by side on this monitor.  The last advantage is that even though this is 1″ smaller than its 24″ older brother, the 2048×1152 resolution actually has more total screen real estate in pixels than the 1920×1200.  You cut about 4% on the height but add about 6% on the width.  Dell has gotten into this game too with the SP2309W which has essentially the same specs as the Samsung.  At Dell, the monitor is so popular it now has a 3-5 week wait if you order today.

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MSI Wind Nettop 100 Assembly

The MSI Wind Nettop 100 is one of the first Dual-Core Atom N330 Processor computers out on the market. It runs at the same 1.6GHz as the Single-Core Atom N270, but provides double the multi-threaded processing power. And remember that the Atom has hyperthreading, so you’ll see 4 logical processors in the OS.

The Nettop 100 is cheap at around $170-180. Since it runs at an average of 35W, it’s also light on the power bill. It will make a nice 24/7 linux home server.

We recommend that you get 2GB DDR2 533MHz CL4 200-pin RAM. This is the optimal speed for the computer. If you buy faster/more expensive ram, it’ll still run at 533Mhz, but with a slower Cas Latency (how long it takes to get a bit of ram). Since it’s only 1 stick of ram, you can’t take advantage of dual-channel, so you’ll want to get the fastest stick that works for this pc.

If you want a large, quiet, and efficient hard drive to go with the rest of the system, the Western Digital Green 1TB is a good choice.

As you can see in the chart below, the graphics is the limiting factor in the computer, but you’ll only notice if you run at high resolutions or play newer 3D games. For the monitor, we suggest you don’t go above 1280×1024, and the computer outputs only VGA (no DVI/HDMI). When we went any higher, the image was cropped and no amount of tweaking on the monitor itself could get the entire screen to display. If they come out with a version that has HDMI, it would make an excellent HTPC (home theater PC).

For the performance, we’ll use the Windows Experience Index (using Windows 7 beta 1):

Component What is rated Subscore
Processor: Calculations per second 3.2
Memory (RAM): Memory operations per second 4.8
Graphics: Desktop performance for windows Aero 2.3
Gaming Graphics: 3D business and gaming graphics performance 3.0
Primary hard disk: Disk data transfer rate 5.6

Video Assembly:

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Kindle 2 Announced

The long awaited Kindle 2 by Amazon was finally announced today.  It was just as the rumors predicted in appearance.  It has several desired improvements but a few shortcomings as well.

Shape and Size

The Kindle 2 is more attractive than the original.  The new thinner design is impressive.  The tradeoff is that the device now has a bigger footprint.  In some cases the original Kindle would fit in your purse, the Kindle 2 may not.  But the same is true for the thickness giving the Kindle 2 an advantage.  With its new thinness, the Kindle 2 can probably fit more easily into some thin pockets in a bag.  Overall, the new shape is an improvement.

Battery Life

The Kindle 2 has 25% more battery life than its predecessor.  The original Kindle had a very impressive battery life already. It is a good idea to turn off your wifi when you aren’t downloading a new book to get longer battery life.  Under typical use of a heavy reader, the original Kindle would last a good week with wifi off.  More battery life is always a welcome improvement to any gadget though.

Page Turning

The page turning buttons have been redesigned.  One of the biggest complaints about the original was how easy it was to unintentionally turn a page.  The Kindle 2 buttons are smaller so they are not as easy to hit accidentally.  Another welcome improvement is pages now turn 20% faster.  The first Kindle wasn’t exactly slow at page turning but you were often left wishing the page would render just a little faster and now the Kindle 2 does.

Storage

Amazon claims “more storage” in the Kindle 2.  This is a bit inaccurate since it really just has more built-in storage.  The original Kindle had an SD card slot for extra storage which means it could hold more if you used that slot.  The Kindle 2 does have more built-in storage but has removed the SD card slot so you are stuck with just the internal memory.  That isn’t a big problem since the internal storage can hold 1,500 books now.  And if you fill it up, you can delete books but still own them.  At any point, you can have a book re-downloaded to your Kindle.  The SD card slot was probably removed to help allow the device to be thinner.  While this is technically a lost feature, it is an acceptable tradeoff for the new thinness.

Screen

The new screen is very similar to the original except that it now has 16 shades of gray.  This allows pictures to look much better.  If you just read books, this is almost pointless.  But if you read newspapers on your Kindle, this will greatly improve your reading experience.

Book Cover

The original Kindle included a leather book cover.  Unfortunately, now this is a $29.99 accessory for the Kindle 2.  To protect your expensive Kindle 2, you have to buy the book cover which makes the Kindle 2 more expensive than its predecessor.

Conclusion

Most of the changes are positive.  Overall the new Kindle isn’t a huge jump over the original, it is more of several small design improvements.  This is a device any avid reader should definitely have.  For a full description of it, check out the Amazon Kindle 2 page.