carnage

Granite Digital FireWire products.

I was reading Macintouch this morning and saw an unusually positive endorsement for Granite Digital, which makes FireWire and other storage-oriented products:

[Louie Berry] My suggestion to him would be take a hard look at Granite Digital's large product list of FireWire enclosures, bridge boards, cables, and complete single units and RAID arrays. Throughout the last several years of reported FW problems, I've never had one instance of trouble from Granite stuff. They write their own firmware for the chipsets and I don't believe an update has been required since the release of 10.2. I use Granite enclosures on all manner of Macs from legacy machines to the latest G5s and move them from machine to machine; OS 9 to Tiger.

For years Granite was the leader in top quality SCSI cables, terminators, RAID, etc. and switched their main thrust to FireWire about five years ago. I have no connection with them except as a satisfied customer for about 10 years.

I don't have any of their stuff, but I may give them a try for a new 3.5" FireWire/USB case and maybe a bridge board for this little 2.5" drive enclosure project I'm thinking of...

G-SAFE.

I just got turned on to G-Technologies, who appear to make "professional strength," highly-engineered storage products. They appear to be setting their sites squarely on LaCie. All of their stuff looks like it's made of aluminum, and they have some innovative features, like cooling fins on their fanless drive cases.

They've just announced the G-SAFE, which is a 2-drive RAID 1 array, which means you get the much safer mirroring, rather than the higher speed and capacity (but zero redundancy) of RAID 0. (I'm just now really learning about RAID these days, and will have a more complete rundown of the various options soon.)

They don't have a page on their site yet; just a PDF. The G-SAFE is supposed to be on sale now, but I can't find it anywhere. It starts at $499.

G-Technologies G-SAFE brochure PDF

Thanks, Goldie!

New drives for the laptops.

I was planning on getting a new hard drive for the Titanium anyway, but I was going to take that old drive out and put it into the Wallstreet, since it was quite a bit bigger (20GB vs. 4GB) and ran quieter. It would have made a great drive to try installing Tiger on, via XPostFacto. Unfortunately, it's about to die, so I went hunting for not one, but two new laptop drives.

Chris helped me get a price check on some drives, and ultimately I went for couple of 60GB 5400rpm Western Digital Scorpio drives for $80 bucks from the Dell Small Business store, which I found through dealmac. Total damage: $175 shipped. Not bad, but not as good as the $20 Western Digital 80GB desktop drives I scored last week from Best Buy.

S.M.A.R.T.

I was all set to install Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) on my 15" Titanium PowerBook G4 last night. I decided to run Disk Utility off of the install disc, just in case, and guess what it found? The 20GB drive inside was in the process of failing. Disk Utility alerted me by displaying the drive's name in red text, and filling the right-hand side of the window with a mildly scary message telling me that my drive was failing and that if possible, I should salvage my data and replace the drive:

Disk Utility wouldn't let me do anything else to the drive, either. No permissions repair or other First Aid procedures. Hard core.

I did some digging, and apparently all newer hard drives come with something called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology), which is a self-diagnostic protocol that a drive will run regularly to track things like bad blocks and even mechanical and electronic components.

Cool. I wish it told me automatically, instead of me having to discover it like this. I now wonder if issues on my laptop drive had anything to do with The Crash of 2005, which happened when I was cloning said laptop's drive to my big FireWire drive.

UPDATE Even though it wouldn't let me run Disk Utility, the Tiger Installer Disc let me upgrade to Tiger. Go figure. Of note: Disk Utility 10.4.4 (the version that ships with Panther) and Disk Utility 10.5 (Tiger) handle failing drives differently—10.4.4 won't give you the red text and foreboding message shown above.