This didn’t go quite to plan…
Firstly, my MacBook’s Superdrive (aka DVD burner), decided to fry the laser assembly at some point in the past few weeks… Ouch… So took it down to Nextbyte and they (very promptly, I must say), sorted it out. In one day, out the next, I was impressed.
Having gotten my MacBook back, and receiving my Momentus XT a day late, I had to find the Mac OS X Snow Leopard install disk, which I haven’t seen for like a year… After turning my room upside down, I found it in the garage (of all places)…
Okay, all that done, I whacked in the CD, booted up and started the Snow Leopard installer. Now, as a certified Microsoft guy, there’s this little thing we call “Windows time”, that is, when the computer says “5 minutes remaining”, in Windows, it’s almost always twice that… Today I witnessed “Mac time” first hand… The progress bar seemed to move a fair way, but from the start of the install, to about 10 minutes later, the time remaining went from 30 minutes, to 29 minutes… Eventually, the installer finished with 10 minutes remaining.
Okay, so create my username, do the Apple registration hoo har jump through hoops and sacrifice your first child.
Updates, yeahhhh I’d better run those too…
While it’s doing that, I did the same old `dd` trick…
Low and behold….
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=/dev/zero of=gigabyte.file bs=1024 count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1024000000 bytes transferred in 10.884781 secs (94076306 bytes/sec)
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$
Yep… 90MB/sec, or thereabouts…
I’d call that a massive improvement over the stocko 55MB/sec…
Oh and these speeds are write speeds also, I’m yet to test the read speed, but I expect it will be equally as impressive.
So, thanks Seagate, here’s your free plug, please re-imburse me for my time and money spent purchasing the amazing Momentus XT hard drive. Okay, thanks!
EDIT:So it looks like what it does is, caches the file in the SSD chip after being accessed… Or something like that… As seen below:
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=gigabyte.test of=/dev/null
1953125+0 records in
1953125+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 11.895218 secs (84067395 bytes/sec)
Ashley-Knowles-MacBook-Pro:~ aknowles$ dd if=gigabyte.test of=/dev/null
1953125+0 records in
1953125+0 records out
1000000000 bytes transferred in 4.437224 secs (225366122 bytes/sec)