Bootable Thunderbolt on OSX 10.8

I had to use an external Thunderbolt bootable mac drive for the past 2 weeks and the experience has been great.
If you ever booted off Firewire or USB 2.0, the experience was horrible. You often felt like you were using a 2004 Macbook with a 5400  4800 rpm hard drive. Even USB 3.0 operates fairs very poorly due to random reads/writes. Thunderbolt doesn't seem to have those lag issues and feels nearly native to me.

My early 2012 27" iMac went kaput so it went into service. Before it went in, I cloned the drive to a SSD. While the iMac was in the shop, I booted off the SSD via the Seagate (STAE121) Go-Flex Thunderbolt adapter. I simply plugged the drive into another iMac (and Macbook) and it just worked like usual. No need to install different drivers for different hardware or re-configure anything.

Booting off Thunderbolt is a dream. In fact, running off an external SSD was faster than booting off the normal internal 7200rpm hard drive. Mountain Lion boots in about 10 seconds off Thunderbolt.

Carbon Cloning (ghosting) a Mountain Lion OS with the full Adobe CS 5.5, MS Office, GIT, MySQL suite took less than 10 minutes. My working OS build was approximately 40GB in size so this is pretty fast. I did not suffer any sleep issues or drive disconnecting. The typical usage was 9-10 hours a day.
The only thing that was a slight concern was the Thunderbolt cables warming after extended use.

This is an ideal setup for someone who wants to run different versions of OS and Apps. For example, you can keep up to date with FCP X and have a fast bootable OS with just Final Cut 7 when you need it.

LaCie 2big Thunderbolt Review

Last week, I blogged about getting a LaCie 2big Thunderbolt drive.

Original post can be read here. It was a quick test using them with SSDs instead of the included 7200 rpm Seagate drives.

Today, I will give you my layman unprofessional review.

My unit is a 4TB model and replacing the drives is pretty easy. LaCie's claim of 320 MB/s is pretty accurate in my testing and that claim has been confirmed by various reviews. In fact, when I replaced the drives with SSDs, I was getting 400/475 MB/s.

For some people (mostly Mac users with Thunderbolt before June 2012), this may be the best bang for your buck. Solid State drives (SSDs) will give better raw speed but at the cost of disk size. This unit cost me as much as a 256GB Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 SSD. Instead of 256GB, I get 4TB. You can try an e-Sata RAID box but you'll be topped out at 200 MB/s which is e-Sata's theoretical ceiling.

So, there is no denying that units like this can be appealing to a certain audience. I can see that target audience being video and sound editors who need a big fast scratch drive. Note, I said "scratch" drive because this unit is a striped RAID 0 array. If one drive goes, the entire array is gone. So if you intend to use this drive, I suggest you keep regular backups.

Next, in terms of usage,I had no problems with daisy chaining drives (see picture above) or monitors. Nor did I have any problem with computers going to sleep.

Now, there are only two (maybe three) complaints:

1) This is not a true hardware RAID. The RAID is done via OSX Disk Utility RAID tools. This is buried in the specifications if you care to read. I didn't.

2) By not being a hardware RAID, this is not a bootable drive. I tried and tried installing a clean OS. Apparently, with Lion (and Mountain Lion), there is no recovery partition on a software RAID volume.

3) This in turn means you can't have multiple partitions. You can't split the drive up into multiple partitions (one for time machine, another for scratch, another media).

Are these criticism worth demoting the product? That is up to you to decide.

Overall, I can't complain considering it is a big drive to shuttle files around.

You will get 300MB/second consistently which is pretty great for most people.

Run native ARM Android Apps on your Macintosh

Back at Google I/O, Bluestacks made some headlines that announced you could run Android apps on a Mac.I took it for a spin and have something to report.

It is an early alpha so they have to work some kinks out. They have a curated set of 17 apps such as Facebook, twitter, flipboard and Angry Birds. I tried it and quickly removed it. It took 15 seconds to load which is way slow if you are running an SSD with 2 second Photoshop launches.
You can't install any other apps besides the curated apps.

It seems to be an emulator that does ARM binary to x86 translation. I heard of another similar project and decide to find out if it had a better experience.

BuilDroid is that project. Long time Mac users know what Rosetta did for the Mac OSX transition and this takes a similar approach.  If you remember, Rosetta did binary PowerPC translation for x86 and it ran reasonably well. This is the same idea but with a different architecture, ARM.
BuilDroid uses the "ARM binary emulator" from Intel ("libhoudini") to make this all work. Libhoudini is what will help Intel's Medfield ATOM platform enter the Android space.
This wan an genius idea to hack "libhoudini" and make an Android distro that runs inside VirtualBox.

The results? Well, VirtualBox booted the whole OS in less than 5 seconds vs Bluestack's 15 seconds.
You can install Google Play and download Google Apps and other applications from the market. I downloaded various apps and they work reasonably well. It has the full Ice Cream Sandwich OS with settings, notifications, and soft menu. In comparison, Bluestack is just an app launcher.

In fact, BuilDroid is faster than launching and running the Android SDK's simulator builds.

Both are early stage developments but I am leaning toward BuilDroid. I haven't tried BuilDroid on another operating system but I assume it will work just fine since it is running in VirtualBox.

Links:
http://bluestacks.com/
http://www.buildroid.org/

Galaxy Tab 2 Android running Mac OS

As you can see there is a common theme here. Retro goodness and 80s nostalgia. Here we have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running a classic operating system, Mac OS 7.5.

All you need is a a Mac Classic or Plus ROM, a disk image of the OS and minivmac  emulator at the Google Play Store.

If I have some time, I'll pull up a copy of Basilisk running Mac OS 8 on a HP Touchpad running WebOS.