Which Hard Disk? Selecting modern hard drives
A year ago, deciding what external storage to use with a Mac was relatively straightforward. Whatever your aspirations to large SSD RAID systems, they remained expensive and only worth the investment...
View ArticleIs APFS fully supported yet?
Yesterday’s article about selecting hard disks raised questions about whether APFS is now officially supported on them. Although I stated that it is not, that is neither completely correct, nor...
View ArticleLast Week on My Mac: Migration is like blisters
I normally only try migrating to a new Mac once every three or four years. In the next week or so, I will be sharing my experiences and trying to help you decide how best to do it. As an experience, it...
View ArticleWhen you’ve got more USB-C devices than ports
The same happened with good old USB-A: even when your Mac has four, you quickly accumulate more USB-C devices than you’ve got ports. Yet no one seems to be offering a ‘port expander’ to turn a single...
View ArticleCaring for SSDs: TRIM, wear levelling and APFS
With many Mac users switching from hard disk storage to SSDs, and following my recent article about adding a two-SSD external enclosure, I thought it might be useful to look at some commonly-raised...
View ArticleLast Week on My Mac: The arithmetic of backing up
After Macs themselves, storage and backup hardware accounts for the largest part of my hardware budget. It’s also the gear that I plan most carefully: my current Time Machine backups go onto a...
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Last Week on My Mac: SSD it
Last week I finally retired my 8 year-old Promise Pegasus RAID system, which has steadfastly stored my Time Machine backups on a succession of hard disks over those years. I’ve sort of replaced it with...
View ArticleBeyond Time Machine: 4 Offsite backups
Following the completion of my on-site backups, using a combination of Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync and Time Machine to SSDs in my ThunderBay 4 enclosure, I’ve now got the following cover: fine...
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File Integrity 9 : How error-correcting codes work
If we want to protect important documents from being corrupted or lost, it’s no good just knowing whether any particular copy of a file has been corrupted. You need some means of recovering or...
View ArticleFile Integrity 11 : Which RAID levels enable file recovery?
It’s good that more users are adopting RAID arrays for external storage, but essential to remember that the term RAID doesn’t necessarily bring any improvement in protection of file integrity. Across...
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