By Steven McGurn •
@mtl_steve
Let’s get the 320 GB hard drive upgrade, it should be enough space for awhile…
…or not.
When we ordered the MacBook Pro in February ’09 our entry option for the hard drive was 250 GB, so upgrading to 320 GB wasn’t a huge upgrade, but it was roughly a 40% improvement in head room.
When I ordered the hard drives for the Drobo, I added a 500 GB, 7200 RPM with 32MB cache drive to the shopping cart, which in theory should provide some extra performance compared to the 5400 RPM drive that came stock with the MacBook Pro.
I used SuperDuper to create a bootable image of the original drive onto a firewire external hard drive. This process took roughly four hours to complete. With the image created, the next step was to swap out the drives.

Continue reading Upgrading Hard Drives – It’s Really This Easy
By Steven McGurn •
@mtl_steve
I’ve been wrestling with our home backup strategy for over a year now. A little background: We made the switch from PC to Mac in February 2008. Since then I have shed away my previous strategy of using SyncToy with an external USB hard drive, combined with a slew of 16GB thumb drives held at a top secret offsite location.
I now rely on Time Machine, working in tandem with a 1TB LaCie d2 Quadra hard drive. As hard rives go, this is a beauty. It comes with the following connections:
- Firewire 400
- Firewire 800
- USB 2
- eSATA
It also uses the aluminum chassis effectively as a heat sink, making for an fairly quiet running drive.
Most people would end it there. Continue reading Storage is Cheap
By Johnny Canuck •
@JohnnyCanuck

About four years ago, I decided I had enough of being the family tech support guy and through in my Windows towel for good. Last week, I close the door to Windows in my work life as well… well almost, I still have to connect to Windows Servers, but I am no longer letting a heavy and underpowered Dell Laptop with a track pad that can only be used by contortionists and 4 year olds rule my life. Last week, I bought one of the brand new Apple MacBook Pro with an Intel i5 chip in it. And let me just say, that I’m actually rather upset that I did not do this any sooner. Go ahead Eric, you can call me a Fanboy now, I’ll wait for you to finish your little rant about how I could have bought a Aston Martin or put my kids through college buy now… OK? Can I continue now?
Continue reading Using A MacBook Pro As Your Full-Time Work Computer
By Johnny Canuck •
@JohnnyCanuck
This is my new 15 inch MacBook Pro with an i5 chipset, 256Mb NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M discreet graphics chip, 1/2Tb 7200RPM drive, 4Gb of Ram and the new high resolution (1680×1050) anti-glare led back lit display model number: MacBookPro6,2. For the record I’m upgrading from this:

Continue reading Apple MacBook Pro i5 Unboxing
By Johnny Canuck •
@JohnnyCanuck
Dear Steve,
I have been a pretty loyal FanBoy / Apologist / Web Developer for the past 4 years. In fact, I was one of first Wintel Geeks North of the Border to switch to the new super cool Intel MacBooks. Despite the cooling issues, replacing the logic board a couple of times [...]
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