My experience setting up a 1 Terabyte USB drive on a Macmini

I already have an external 500GB USB drive but with Leopard time-machine taking half of this, and keeping a backlog of downloaded films to hand with several backups from other machines, this means that it's been running pretty full (in fact only about 10GB general storage left and time-machine backups only run 2 months into the past before being deleted forever).

1TB drives (1,000GB) have come down nicely in price and I managed to buy a Western Digital Elements drive on Amazon for under £80. Price was a significant factor for me, as well as compatibility for re-use with other machines, so I didn't really consider the alternative of a firewire compatible version (it would have been potentially 5x faster than a USB 2.0 connection).

How the 1TB USB drive ("Zeus") appears on my desktop using a Matrix icon

It was pre-formatted but as I'm going to use this one exclusively on Leopard, I decided to reformat with "Mac OS Extended" into two partitions, one with 300GB for the time-machine (backup) and the rest (631GB) for my ever growing document, video and photo archives plus around 80GB of other computer archives (some dating back to the 1990s but you never know when some old document might be interesting to search out).

Step One: Reformat the drive

Easy part; plugged in the drive into a spare USB port and using Leopard's Disk Utility, chose the option for two partitions, Mac OS Extended (not journaled), typed in required partition size and let it go ahead.

Step Two: Transfer existing files

This was more problematic. I wanted to transfer around 200+GB from my old USB drive so I just used drag & drop using the Finder but it turned out that the estimated time to transfer was around several days! A little more research, eventually using the System Profiler showed that the USB port (on a USB extra hub) the new drive was plugged into was rated as USB1.1 speed (why can't the Finder show you this information?) so I had to use one of the ports on the main Macmini box to get it running at USB2.0 speeds (12x faster). This still gave an estimated 12 hours to transfer the files but at least this could run overnight.

Note that the real times for transfer I achieved were nowhere near the theoretical maximum (put 200GB/USB2.0 into WolframAlpha and you get 55 minutes). This was probably due to the old drive being formatted in (non-native version of) NTFS and though I have an open source driver to enable read/write access, it's pretty likely that this means extra processing power is needed to get the data transferred.

It was a good lesson, USB can be slow, so moving large archives is worth a little planning. Obviously on a day-to-day basis the largest things I'll move would be video files but these are on average less than 1GB and it's not an issue to wait for a minute (assuming USB2.0, on a USB1.1 connection, 1GB takes a minimum of 11 minutes to transfer).

WD Elements 1TB USB 2.0

Step Three: Setup Time Machine

I went into Time Machine settings (via System Preferences) and changed the drive to be used to the new blank partition.

[This is the bit I failed to sort out] I wanted to copy across all my previous Time Machine archive files on the old disk into the new folder created on the new disk. This was another 123GB (3½ million items), but after trying to do this several ways (including making both drives read/write after Time Machine made them read-only) I found it invariably caused Finder to lock up. Eventually I gave up and started Time Machine from scratch (it was still an 82GB initial backup).

Conclusion

After all the transfers, and with 300GB reserved in a partition for Time Machine, I now have 380GB spare for new files. As for the old 500GB drive, it's become a nifty media and backup disk shared on my home network connected to a Vista desktop. As this drive had previously been re-partitioned on my Mac, I took the precaution of reformatting it from scratch using Vista to ensure a stable drive standard.

Final speeds: Transferring a 700MB video file to my new archive (named Zeus) now takes me around 15 seconds. Compare that to 2½ minutes to transfer the same file from the old USB drive, across my home network, to get to my new drive. Let's hope USB3.0 gets a move on!

Mac mini - six things they did not tell you about switching from PC to Macintosh

Last November, after my PC died for about the 4th time I knew there was something seriously wrong, probably something odd happening with the motherboard. I thought I'd treat myself to something different so I splashed out on a Mac mini (Core Duo).

Tip: If you are buying a Mac from Apple, consider the cost of memory upgrades. I would have opted for a 2GB Mac mini rather than the standard 1GB version but they wanted £80 for the privilege. The actual memory cost from Crucial.com is £32 and when I sold my old memory on eBay for £12 I realized I had saved myself £60!

Mostly it's worked as promised but the following painful annoyances rather caught me out:

1. Parallels did not come as standard, something I really needed for running some of my old windows applications. My only other option would have been to reserve a major chunk of my hard disk and use dual booting, something that I've had real issues with in the past. I took a trial copy of Parallels and it works fairly well apart from being too slow. In fact so slow that in January I upgraded the memory (to 2GB), though as I'm techie enough to do this myself it was under 30 quid.


2. Webcam did not work. This has been a headache. Not only did my Philips USB webcam not work, there are no valid drivers to make it work (I wasted hours trying to get a generic driver to work). Even worse, there are no guarantees that any other cheap camera I can find will actually work. I still don't have a replacement webcam.


3. Scanner did not work. I have a rather expensive Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. Unfortunately there are no drivers that will make it work natively in Leopard. I eventually got it running under Windows 2000 in Parallels, hardly ideal.


4. EVE Online does not work. I tried out a free account with EVE Online (a well known and popular multi-player game for the Mac), sadly it doesn't run reliably on the Mac mini and freezes up randomly.


5. Can't network with a PC. This is particularly annoying. I've been trying for several weeks to get this working. I have worked through inbuilt help and googled for solutions to no avail. I can get my Mac to recognize my home networked PC and even read/write files to its hard disk but not the reverse. I wanted this to work as I'm using a 500GB USB drive as my Time Machine and I've kept space on it for PC backups but as the Mac remains invisible to the PC my archive/backup process is frustratingly manual and I can't share a central file library.


6. Can't use my microphone/headphone. This was not made clear in the summary specification and is a really stupid design flaw. The audio-in socket is actually only for digital microphones. This means that my headphone microphones will not work (though confusingly they fit the socket and it took me quite a while to find out this was not some sort of driver problem). Consequently since buying the Mac I have not been able to use Skype, a real problem as I use this as my home office number. I have been searching for a second-hand iMic device (they're a bit pricey new), a USB adaptor for microphones, I should be able to find one for under £15. The alternative would have been to get a bluetooth microphone, but I can't bear having yet another device to keep charged up.