Handmade external cooling

12/08/08 20:41 Filed in: Hardware

In this week's BitDepth, I explore the challenges of keeping a backup system going and the recent drive failures that I've suffered through.
Two drive failures in less than eight months is something to be concerned about, and changing drive brands was part of the solution.

In the past, I've mentioned the poor results that I've had with drives from Western Digital, which populated many iMacs a few years ago and even a few laptops. In those days, I used to provide technology support services for a few Mac clients and the incidence of failed drives from that manufacturer was well above average.

I'd had good experiences with drives from IBM, so when they sold their business to Hitatchi, I went along. Those good experiences came to a close with my recent woes and I've since switched to Toshiba's mechanisms in the hope of seeing an improvement.
That said, I also have to acknowledge that I push drives well past their expected profile of use and the close tolerances of larger drive capacities shoved into tiny cases inevitably create difficult working environments for what is essentially a magnetic "needle" skittering back and forth a hair's breadth above a polished metal "platter."

In an effort to reduce what appears to be a new trend of inadvertent DJ scratching of these delicate mechanisms, particularly during heavy Lightroom and Photoshop use, I've added some external cooling to my laptop.
At first, I looked around for a really small desktop fan, something around eight inches in diameter that I could wedge under the shelf behind my laptop. I couldn't find any of those, and began seriously looking at exhaust fans, but they were really expensive.

I finally settled on internal computer fans (well, doh) ganged in a pair on a card behind my system.
The ratchafee rig has worked well so far, and wicks hot air away from my laptop system silently and briskly.

I got the pair of fans from Circuit Zone, a local computer supplier, who helpfully gave me all the wiring and voltage information I needed to put the system together on a phone call.
I bought two 80mm fans, clipped the excess cabling and wired them through a toggle switch to a 5v mains adapter. Five volt adapters aren't easy to find, but some cell phones use them and the power supplies from old Zip drives are also rated correctly (who thought those would ever be useful again?).

I glued the two fans to a stiff black card with a shim under the back of the card to angle everything down to the rear of my Macbook and let it dry.
The rig is completely silent and small enough that I can't see it, tucked behind my laptop's screen while I'm working.
While editing images I sometimes feel a rush of warm air gusting away under my arm as I work and smile.

Tags: Make

What I use for backup

12/08/08 20:32 Filed in: Software

Some folks who read my recent BitDepth column on backup asked about the software that I use and suggest.
All things being equal, I like free and I like cheap.

Most backup software on the Mac uses command line applications like PSync and Ditto. Years ago, I bought Deja Vu, which I first discovered as an added value software add-on for Toast, Roxio's optical media burning software.
It has an elegant setup, allowing the user to set a folder as the source and another as the destination.

You can add as many instances of source and destination as you wish. It's possible to set the software to do neat stuff like backup to a network drive (mounting it automatically when it's ready), but I've settled for simply setting multiple backup points that all get reconciled with a single click.
You can do pretty much the same thing with iBackup, free software that quite capably is made available with basic backup profiles that you can customise or create a new profile from scratch.

If you're using Leopard, you have backup software built in, Apple's Time Machine, which only requires that you have a backup disc available as a destination. Once Time Machine has a destination drive, it takes over, first performing a full backup of your entire hard drive and then incrementally adding to it at regular intervals.
It hasn't worked out all that well for me, though.

I have large data sets that change quite regularly, huge image folders that get edited before they are ready for backup and Time Machine is an all or nothing system. You either backup the whole Mac or painstakingly set specific files, folders or volumes (if your startup disk is partitioned) for exclusion. With data turnover like mine, I’ll need to have a volume for Time Machine that’s at least four times the size of my startup volume.

I'm still thinking through how to make the best use of Time Machine, because the ability to restore from a Time Machine backup when reinstalling Mac OS X would have been really handy during my last effort to restore my work file after the drive failed.

Tags: backup

Updating the modern Mac

15/07/08 14:52 Filed in: Maintenance

Running system updates on Mac OS X can be tricky business. Read More...

Tags: MacOS

FTP on the Mac

24/06/08 11:50 Filed in: Software

If you need an FTP client, you’ll find many useful choices available for the Mac. Choosing the right one is a matter of matching need to software. Read More...

Tags: Web

Secrets of the word warrior

14/05/08 09:01 Filed in: Software

Every warrior has a secret weapon sheathed in a secret personal space on his person. SpellCatcher and Grammarian are the hidden shoe knives I unleash on my words before releasing them into the world. Read More...

Tags: Word processing