Using Xbench, first, the 5400 RPM stock drive that came with my 17″ MacBook Pro.

Results 25.96

    System Info

        Xbench Version      1.3
        System Version      10.6.2 (10C540)
        Physical RAM        4096 MB
        Model       MacBookPro5,2
        Drive Type      FUJITSU MHZ2320BH FFS G1
    Disk Test   25.96

        Sequential  29.52

            Uncached Write  31.66   19.44 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  34.00   19.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   24.57   7.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   29.57   14.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  23.17

            Uncached Write  9.73    1.03 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  38.94   12.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   41.98   0.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   49.22   9.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Compared to the new OCZ Agility SSD drive.

Results 225.00

    System Info

        Xbench Version      1.3
        System Version      10.6.2 (10C540)
        Physical RAM        4096 MB
        Model       MacBookPro5,2
        Drive Type      OCZ-AGILITY
    Disk Test   225.00

        Sequential  218.78

            Uncached Write  288.14  176.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  250.35  141.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   121.72  35.62 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   384.23  193.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  231.58

            Uncached Write  74.76   7.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  421.12  134.82 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   2764.59 19.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   862.34  160.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Freaking A. An order of magnitude difference. I can feel it, too.

It’s nice to see how the drive performs over the max write speed of 135 MB/s. Probably will go down as I start using the drive more. All in all, a nice investment.

(BOO. I agree.)

(Man, this kid should get some sleep.)

The Looks

It oozes teh awesome. That’s pretty much all there is to say on this.

Except, some people would be very much bothered by the screen. I haven’t had a situation yet where I felt like I would pay an extra $50 (an option on the 17″) to remove the glossy display, but I can understand the people who prefer the diffusion of the matte displays instead.

However, since the backlight is much brighter than any previous MacBook Pro versions, I can usually blast away any random light sources… and burn out my eyes in the process.

Sidenote: I rarely have my backlight set to max. One or two below the max is quite enough.

The Feel

The unibody feels amazingly sturdy. I feel like I can finally stop babying my Macbook Pro. (Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t stop doing so…)

I couldn’t believe it, but it’s even smoother than the earlier MacBook Pros. And to think that I thought those laptops were awesome. Pfft.

The Trackpad

If Apple made a bluetooth version of this trackpad, I’d buy it. I’ve opted to float my MacBook Pro next to my external screen for better ergonomics, and so I use my trackball instead.

But when I’m on the go… they weren’t kidding about getting the coefficient of friction just right. And the additional gestures are fun, too. I had my three-finger swipe down to be cmd + w. Works good for everything but… Finder.

Sidenote: They really really need to update Finder.

Comparisons to the “old” MacBook Pro

A few things come to mind immediately.

The lid can open up a few degrees more on the new unibody, for those rare occasions when I do need a few more degrees. I felt very limited with the older ones, almost to the point where I risked breaking the hinge because I would always triple check to see if it really was that limiting.

The problem with the lid now is that it has become heavier. I think it probably has something to do with the glossy screen. Whatever the reason may be, if you start angling the laptop at an angle, you’ll notice the lid starting to close up on you simply by the weight of the lid itself. However, the lid stays solid while I type away on the keyboard, so no big issues there. It just takes a tiny bit of getting used to, compared to the stiffer hinge of the older MacBook Pros.

Et Cetera

I like the fact that the CD drive is on the side: Although I rarely use it, I find that having it on the side just makes a lot more sense. (e.g. If it’s sitting on your lap, or if it’s on a mount with the rubber feet pushing against the bottom of the laptop)

I do miss the USB port on both sides. The first generation iPod shuffle and my bigger SD USB card reader is so wide that I can’t have the both of them connected at the same time. Solution to this is to just rock a USB hub and call it a day.

MiniDisplay Port? Being forced to buy yet another adaptor? And no, I wasn’t willing to buy the 24″ Cinema Display. No, I’m not that crazy.

Note to self: I really need to write that anti-fanboy post. Hmm.

One HUGE Problem: The Audio

The audio is the biggest FAIL for the MacBook Pro. I can live with a lot of the design decisions they’ve made, but the audio…

The physical 3.5mm or 1.8″ headphone jack sucks compared to the older MBP. It pops out a bit too easily compared to the older ones. But this is compounded by the fact that there is now a second or two of lag where the MacBook Pro switches from the built-in speakers to the headphones.

Right, that, and the constant hissing, as well as the R2D2 bleep blooping that happens from time to time. This has been an issue for a while, but I think it’s gotten worse with the Unibody. Yes, I can buy more things to fix this, but seriously, for a MacBook Pro, I’m expecting near perfection here. For now, I’m okay with my little volume attenuator.

That is, until I become a audiophile. I am the mouse, and my HD-555s is my cookie. I sure hope this isn’t my milk.

Conclusion

I love this thing. Heck, I’m just waiting for the day I can upgrade to the 17″. WTB moar pixels. Maybe after WWDC, I’ll buy the current 17″ model if they upgrade it.

Unless… Apple pulls out something magical. Unless. (!)

Good thing I have Twitter and all the past tweets of this weekend, because I don’t quite fully remember what happened this past weekend. Being up for at least 36 hours is never a good thing, although, somehow, I found the strength to keep going. (Her name is Caffeine. Our relationship was complicated, and now, it’s about to get broken.)

This past weekend was weird. I was up for at least 36 hours, doing such tasks like:

• Drinking wayyy too much caffeine.
• 44 oz MD + 32 oz Coke + Guru + Brain Toniq. Yeah, wired.
• Scanning Bills and Receipts for preparations for the 1040′s. Hooray for Yep.
• Works awesome with my scanner since Canon CanoScan LiDE25 software is a piece of crap: Awesome blog post on circumventing the idiocy.
• Finding out that my MacBook Pro doesn’t like the 4 GB update. Should have read this, and all the Apple Support Forum stuff first.
• I believe I got to crash #7 until I realized that it was the RAM.
• To tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s the load on the processor. I’ve had mine crash when I had just Skype open. There’s something really wrong in the firmware or something.
• Although, I did crash once after I replaced my old ones back in. It hasn’t since Sunday, so I guess this is a good thing.
• Installed Windows
• Kinda annoyed at the Samsung SC-MX20 issue with not being able to properly flag 16:9 videos.
• This took the most time on Sunday. If I can get this done, I vow to make a donationware product through HanMeta for the other SC-MX20 users to enjoy (on the Mac… there seems to be a possible solution for PC users, but I can’t cling onto that). But that’s… we’ll see. So… much… hacking…
• Learning that caffeine doesn’t actually help indigestion.

But the whole point of this post is not to talk about what I did this weekend, but what I realized I had to do. And I know, it was January, 11th… let’s keep that out of here as we talk about world domination plans.

I finally continued reading Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely. What came next was not caused by what I actually read, but what I took to heart while reading it. I don’t even remember what it was about… something to do with Bill Gates.

The realization was to be even more ruthless with my time. Even more so than I am. My ways of overthinking needs to end. A testament to this new way of life was how I went about writing this post. I just kept whittling it down and down until this post happened.

It must be because of prepping for a trip to Seattle this weekend, but I feel the need to accomplish something before then. Today has been a throwaway day because… I’m still recovering from the mess of this weekend.

But seriously, I need to blog more short posts. Make more things into multi-part blot posts, or something.

LaCie 500 GB d2 Quadra

Firewire is amazing for external hard drives. It’s a little bit more expensive then the single USB 2.0 options, but man… it’s a lot faster.

Plus, you really can’t buy external drives with just FireWire anymore. Usually. FireWire drives just come with USB anyway, so you’ve got some backward capability.

Yes, I just called USB 2.0 “backwards”. You’ll see why in a second.

tan ( ) : Firewire, USB 2.0 Comparison

From the site: FireWire – USB Comparison

FireWire is faster than USB 2.0 in sustained throughput.

Read Test:

• 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
• 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:

• 5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
• 160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0

USB 2.0: Needs a master and a slave. Peripherals are dumb. FireWire 400: Peer-to-peer. Peripherals are intelligent.

Back to the rest of the post: The Pipes

Here are some random numbers, for your pleasure.

Now, mind you, these are theoretical limits of the pipe. Doesn’t say anything about how fast the devices are running themselves. (Hooray for CS 423 – Operating Systems, this class should be required.)

Right, so how fast does a 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache hard drive read and write? This largely depends on burst and sustained… Seek time is less than 10ms… How far radially is the data stored…

I wasn’t able to figure this out. If someone can give me actual numbers, I’ll be very appreciated. So instead, I decided to run some tests.

Even better. Actual real world tests.

Using Xbench

Internal Hard Drive (SATA)

Results 37.67
    System Info
        Xbench Version      1.2
        System Version      10.4.11 (8S2167)
        Physical RAM        2048 MB
        Model       MacBookPro3,1
        Drive Type      FUJITSU MHW2160BHPL
    Disk Test   37.67
        Sequential  59.52
            Uncached Write  69.06   42.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  64.01   36.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   41.65   12.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   76.38   38.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  27.56
            Uncached Write  9.86    1.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  62.81   20.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   59.29   0.42 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   91.63   17.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]

FireWire 800

Results 51.81
    System Info
        Xbench Version      1.2
        System Version      10.4.11 (8S2167)
        Physical RAM        2048 MB
        Model       MacBookPro3,1
        Drive Type      ST350063 0AS
    Disk Test   51.81
        Sequential  83.84
            Uncached Write  68.96   42.34 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  99.59   56.35 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   60.13   17.60 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   152.93  76.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  37.49
            Uncached Write  12.78   1.35 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  94.76   30.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   91.12   0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   144.77  26.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]

What the heck is going on? How the heck is my external outperforming my desktop in every single possible way?

EDIT: I had forgot to think about the RPMs. Since laptops are design for lower power consumption, normally they come with 5400 RPM drives instead of 7200 RPM, which is the one that’s in the external. Now these numbers make sense.

For fun, I performed the test for FireWire 400 and USB 2.0.

FireWire 400

Results 44.61
    System Info
        Xbench Version      1.2
        System Version      10.4.11 (8S2167)
        Physical RAM        2048 MB
        Model       MacBookPro3,1
        Drive Type      ST350063 0AS
    Disk Test   44.61
        Sequential  59.75
            Uncached Write  53.08   32.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  64.79   36.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   50.22   14.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   78.36   39.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  35.59
            Uncached Write  12.97   1.37 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  65.63   21.01 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   91.10   0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   109.82  20.38 MB/sec [256K blocks]

USB 2.0

Results 16.61
    System Info
        Xbench Version      1.2
        System Version      10.4.11 (8S2167)
        Physical RAM        2048 MB
        Model       MacBookPro3,1
        Drive Type      ST350063 0AS
    Disk Test   16.61
        Sequential  12.73
            Uncached Write  30.12   18.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  31.23   17.67 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   4.45    1.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   41.40   20.81 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random  23.89
            Uncached Write  8.47    0.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write  44.95   14.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read   69.71   0.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read   78.19   14.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Here’s a simple table output of this data.

In a real world test, an External FireWire 800 connection somehow managed to beat my Internal SATA drive. Again, if someone could possibly explain this data, let me know.

EDIT: Once again, I realized the error I made: Here, I thought for some reason that the internal drive had similar specs as the external. I also have a feeling that the buffer size is going to be different also due to the size difference (8 MB for internal, 16 MB for external).

Conclusion

In the end, I’m glad I made the switch to FireWire. Now all my Time Machine backups are faster, and requires less strain on the Core 2 Duo processors.

I really hope, though, that the next external data source I purchase will be a part of the Cloud… you know, the ones where I don’t have to deal with the physical media at all. No disks, no CDs, no DVDs, not even Hard Drives: Just some made up blocks of data storage somewhere.

I was going to write up a full post on this, but I might as well let someone else do the talking.

The main point, however, is that if you’re a student: Regardless of your major, you should not be getting your higher end Apple products through the educational discount. Instead, you should join Apple Developer Connection (ADC) and buy it through that.

Example: My MacBook Pro. For $99 (and a little hassle of scanning in your ID and sending it to Apple), you’re saving $200 on top of the educational discount. Overall, you save $100.

Of course, what they don’t tell you… is that when you first join ADC, they send you a nice DVD for OS X. I sold it immediately on eBay for $70. Then I got yet another OS CD… not sure why, but I sold that too. In the end, I paid for an extra 1 GB of memory this way.

And I didn’t think about this one, but… try to see if you know of any friends that work for Apple. It’s even cheaper than ADC.

How to Buy an Apple Computer

Let me just go through where my data lives, and how it made my life so much easier to get back on track after my reformat.

• Email

  • Gmail: I think I’m going to start using Gmail as my sole email application. It seems like for some reason, this time around, SMTP doesn’t want to work in Mail.app. Also, since I’ve already gone Google for RSS feeds as well as my budgeting/documenting/spreadsheet-ing, might as well commit to… er… submit to the Google overlords.
  • I have to go and somehow find a way to match the folder structure I have on my desktop to Gmail’s labeling structure.
  • Is there a way to move all your mail from one service provider to another? Is Yahoo really going to provide unlimited storage? This really isn’t a selling point, though, since I don’t think I’m even hitting 10% of my storage space yet.
    • But, of course, through the wonders of gDisk, I’ve begun backing up my most important documents, like blog post rough drafts and such.

• Contact Information

  • Plaxo: I love it. It’s free for us normal users… plus, there’s a little bit of the social magic built into the app: you can send “eCards” to people with their information and such.
  • I don’t use Plaxo much, but I do use the synchronization tool with Address Book, and you know how I love to think that syncing is going to be one of the many killer web apps.

• Calendar

  • This is next… to go with Google Calendar? How about Plaxo? How about something completely new?

• Bookmarks

  • What? Delicious? The only thing I needed to reinstall to get back into bookmarking was the bookmarking extension for Firefox and Safari.
  • I’m satisfied with delicious to even think about moving to ma.gnolia.

• Feeds

  • Google Reader: I love it. I think I might start integrating the “Starred Items” on the blog like Alex Argo has done.

After all… they’re all bits and bytes. It’s the application that brings that information to life. With web apps, though, you get a handy method of not having to deal with keeping track of your own data: the system does it for you.

Actually, more like… the system administrators of the web applications are doing that management of data for you.

Hey, it’s less work for me! But… alas, advertising revenue for them…