Guides
Seagate Hybrid XT Review
August 30, 2011
SSD is a big thing nowadays, bringing performance & reliability to our laptops. But it comes at a cost, and currently that’s purely lots of cold hard cash, a 512GB SSD drive is around £600+, whereas 500GB of spinning platters is around £50 instead.
In desktop machines you can come to a fairly easy compromise of sticking in a 32GB SSD for a reasonable cost to cover the OS & applications, then stick in a few 3.5″ hard drives to cover all the data storage requirements you like. My MacBook however, like most laptops (or many an iMac) has only two drive bays, and one of them is occupied by a very useful optical drive, though this, if you aren’t using it can be replaced by an optibay which allows you to replace your internal optical drive with a second hard drive. On the older machines the optical is an ATA drive so you’re limited to the one SATA hard drive bay.
There is another way though, the Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid drive combining 500GB of spinning platters, with 4GB of SSD. There’s a build in controller board that then stores the files you use the most, on this SSD area to boost the performance of your laptop, whilst keeping the costs down to a very pocket friendly level of sub £100. So what’s it like? Well there’s some very good timed figures over on the Anandtech review, so I’m going to concentrate on what the change felt like in the real world.
My MacBook featured a Toshiba 320GB 5400rpm drive, which I’d fitted about 5 minutes after my 2.0GHz unibody MacBook arrived back in October 2008, replacing the original 160GB which was far too small for my requirements. Recently though I’ve been bouncing off 40GB free, so I’d been toying with the three options, the 32GB SSD/500GB in the optidrive bay, the Seagate Hybrid, or splashing some serious cash & getting a 2011 spec quad core 15″. Logging in from sleep, deleting a mass batch of photos in Lightroom, switching users, various tasks were all bringing up the beach ball, and some newer faster machinery passing through my hands were getting seriously tempting, however as you can tell for once I resisted temptation and decided to give the Seagate Hybrid a trial.
Luckily for me at least the next part is a breeze, install the new drive in to the machine, erase, install original drive in to an external caddy and clone your data across (don’t have the kit, contact me I can do this for you). Cloning saves a whole load of effort, as all your apps, data etc is all copied across just as it was on the old drive. To all intents and purposes you carry on where you left off, some though at this point may decide to go for a clean install, but I’d got a busy weekend ahead, so decided to just go for the clone.
The first boot was as disappointingly slow as the graphs show on the AnandTech review, no real change to before, but the clone had taken till midnight, so I put the machine to sleep, something to look at tomorrow. That first days use though and the change was starting to become obvious, firing up Lightroom, there was definitely a boost in snappiness, it wakes from sleep noticeably quicker, switches users quicker, not just numbers on the graph never see the difference quicker, but proper real world quicker, yes I’m glad I’ve just spent £100 on it quicker. I’m not going to go all the way out there and say it’s going to be as fast as a new shiny quad core, but it’s appeased that upgrade lust, and I’ve still got £1400 left in my back pocket not hitting the credit card. It’s not going to be the answer for all, but during these tighter times, if you’re old MacBook (Pro) is starting to feel a bit old, or even if you’d like your new one to be a bit quicker (assuming it isn’t already fitted with SSD), then the Seagate XT offers some very worthwhile bang for the buck. Now I just wonder what one of those quad core 15″ would be like with the Hybrid installed…
NB when I posted that I’d got this drive on Twitter, some asked about battery life & heat, my own laptop lives on the mains 90% of the time, so not got any before/after figures, but the AnandTech review suggests similar power consumption to a typical 5400/7200 drive, so I can’t see any huge difference in battery life. Heat wise, I used it on my lap for most of the day Sunday, and if anything felt less heat burn than usual, that’s purely very subjective of course. I do know this though, I’ve watched temps on various machines and the two biggest factors on temps, are a) ambient b) the amount of heat the main & graphics processors are kicking out (a flash blocker will keep this down nicely). Slightly faster HDD makes maybe 1-2ºC difference, but room ambient unless you’ve got temp controlled air condition, can affect the temps by a good 10ºC+.
Posted in 
Tags: Backup
December 30, 2010
Quite often come across conversations with both clients & on twitter with people who have lost all their data when their computer has been stolen, or the hard drive has crashed, or damaged etc etc.
Nowadays external hard drives are both cheap & quick, so there is no financial excuse not to have a backup copy of your hard drive contents, and the software to do this is usually cheap or free.
Wherever possibly I always advise that at least one copy of your backup should be ‘off site’, criminals, fire, flood all tend to be pretty indiscriminate and will take/destroy everything. If your backup drive is there on your desk next to your computer, both will go. If you are in an area subject to natural disasters then your off site backup may want to be a long way away, here in the UK, a friend, family, office a few miles away is usually good enough. If you aren’t in an area subject to flooding then even a neighbour (not attached) should usually be fine too.
Backup drives
External drives come in 2.5″ & 3.5″ versions, each have their own pros & cons.
3.5″ drives buy you the most ‘bang for buck’ but require their own power supply (often a weak point), are faster, and available in larger capacities, but by their nature are generally large & heavy.
2.5″ drives are more expensive, and currently top out at 1TB, but they are small enough to fit in a coat pocket, so easier to hide away in another location without them being inconvenient. They are also ‘self powered’ so no worries about losing the power supply.
You may also want to refer to this article from Retrodata on the Good, Bad & Ugly hard drives and some further buying advice.
Currently I’m running a matched pair home/office of 3.5″ drives which share power supplies, so if one fails I’ve got backup power too. These are a ‘roll your own’ using an enclosure from Starmount which has a big 80mm fan to keep the drive cool, and you can just select capacity/brand of choice, and also upgrade for just the cost of the drive if you exceed capacity later.
There is also the options of USB2 or Firewire 400/800 drives, USB2 is cheaper, FW400/800 has faster sustained data rates, but not all machines are equipped with Firewire ports. For most USB2 offers ample speed. Also worth noting Intel Macs can boot from USB drives, but if you’ve got an older PPC G4/G5 machine then it can only boot from Firewire.
For a starting point, expect to pay less than £50 for a 1TB 3.5″ drive or 500GB 2.5″ drive. Professional clean room drive recovery if you’ve not got a backup starts at £230…
For more serious capacities of backup, you can start getting in to Drobos and Network Attached Storage (NAS), but for now going to stick with the basics.
Software
From here on in this post is now Mac only…
First out the box is Time Machine, if you’ve bought a new Mac in the last few years it will have come with 10.5 Leopard or 10.6 Snow Leopard which comes with Time Machine backup software included free. Simply plug in your new hard drive, and the Mac will pop up a dialogue asking you if you want to use this new drive with Time Machine, click ‘use as backup disk’ and every hour all your user data is synchronized, it’ll automatically delete the oldest backups but you should be able to roll back to older versions of a file if you find you’ve made a mistake. From a fresh start of Mac OS 10.5+ (either for disaster recovery or for a new machine) the installer setup will ask you to plug in a Time Machine hard drive to restore your data back to your new machine. All very easy, but you can’t really customise anything it does, except exclude folders from the backup. For more info see the Time Machine 101
If you’ve got a few machines you may also want to look at the ‘Time Capsule‘ which is available in Time Capsule 1TB, Time Capsule 2TB, or the Airport Extreme Basestation which you can plug your own choice of USB hard drive in to the back of, they are then visible on your network to all macs & Time Machine can then back up to them. Especially useful if you’ve got a handful of MacBooks at home/work to backup.
Next up is Chronosync, this is $40 but is very customisable. This is the software I personally use, it can set up scheduled timed backups, fully bootable, backup on mount, backup the complete HD, or just selective parts of the HD. Parts of this such as the ‘backup on mount’ with bidirectional sync can be used cleverly with items such as a very small backup set so that when you mount a flash drive, you have say a ‘work’ folder it synchronises, useful for a folder of work that you switch back between machines. Services such as Dropbox have made this a bit less redundant as it can be done without thinking over the internet, but for those on the end of a piece of string phone line wise, or it’s secure data you don’t want to entrust to a person/company you don’t know and trust, still a useful feature. On my personal machine I just backup the user data folders to keep the backup size down, the OS & apps can all be quickly installed from CD (and I keep the paid & unpaid downloaded software DMG files etc in the backup area). Because it can backup to folders on the destination HD it can also backup multiple HDs or machines to one drive, which expands it’s usability further.
Another popular choice is SuperDuper a bit cheaper than Chronosync at $28 (though you can download & trial), it doesn’t offer all the features of Chronosync, but specialises in doing full or incremental bootable backups, through a pretty easy to use interface.
For those that love the word ‘free’ there is the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) which is shareware, & offers no fuss cloned backups, updates have made this much more user friendly, and scheduling options. I use this on the mail server at the office however which takes a long time to set up, I do fully bootable clones, so if the HD in the server dies, just insert a new HD, and clone the backup back and carry on from a few hours ago…
Hidden away in Disk Utility since around 10.4 has been an option to ‘Restore’ a drive, there’s no incremental options, or schedules, but if you want to make a bootable clone, it is a good free option.
Final mention goes to Retrospect v8. I’ve used the previous versions in the office for mass backups of all the machines over the network, and it’s always split opinions. But the latest version isn’t even fit for beta, it’s the most unreliable turd of software I’ve used. Not what you want for backups.