I’ve made several changes to the Mac Minis in the last week or so.  First, Mac Mini number one, the ‘early-2009’ 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, was upgraded to OS 10.7 Lion and along with that it got some new hard drives.  The primary 500GB Wesetrn Digital drive was upgraded to a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD drive, and the dead DVD drive was replaced with a HDD tray and the old 500GB Western Digital drive.

How successful were the upgrades? Well, I’m not convinced that Lion/10.7 is an improvement over 10.6.  Overall, some of the features are interesting (Launchpad, applications that save their state, file versioning), but others are crippled, frustrating, or just missing (Spaces, Finder, Dashboard, Rosetta, Front Row). I can cope with the changes, but what I don’t like are the crashes and bugs. Mail crashes frequently and regularly, the system won’t reliably sleep and Launchpad won’t keep icons where I put them.  I suppose these are the issue one may expect from an 10.x.0 release…

The Momentus XT hybrid SSD/7200rpm drive works just fine, but I can’t say that I noticed any change in speed or system responsiveness. However, the drive was installed along with a new OS, so it’s difficult to say if the drive is any faster than the old 5400RPM Western Digital. Speaking of which, the old drive and new HDD tray (search eBay for 12.7mm HDD caddy) that replaced the dead DVD drive was easy and a noticeable improvement.  The drive was recognised as an internal SATA drive and this is an easy and quick way to double internal storage.  Responsie time from the drive on the internal SATA bus is vastly improved over the external FW400 or USB 2.0 ports.

Adding the second drive also opens the door for future upgrades such as a small SSD for the OS and a large secondary data disk. How does a 128GB SSD system drive and a 1TB data drive sound?

Moving on, I had originally planned to upgrade Mac Mini number two, the ‘early-2006’ 1.66 GHz Core Duo, to Lion as well, but after upgrading the other Mini I decided against it.  The lack of Front Row was the main reason I decided against the upgrade (yes, I know it can be reinstalled from an old 10.6 system), but aside from the Front Row issue, I really don’t see any reason to upgrade.

However, prior to deciding against Lion, I bought an Intel T7200 Core 2 Duo CPU off of eBay for about $40 AUD.  The T7200 is a dual-core 2.0 GHz, 4MB L2 cache CPU that meets the minimum systems specs required to run Lion; this is in contrast to the original T2300 1.66 GHz Core Duo that was in the Mini that does not meet Lion’s minimum requirements. Anyway, the CPU upgrade was simple, and I even got to break out the ‘Arctic Silver III’ thermal compound left over from my PC building days– I think the last time it was used was 2001/2002 when I built the Athlon XP 2000+ system.

So, is the system faster?  Maybe.  Speed (or lack there of) wasn’t an issue before, but at least I have the option of upgrading to 10.7 should I decide to later.

It’s been a while, but here is another update on my non-Apple TV.  The set up has remain largely unchanged, though the usage has evolved with changes in the available video sources.

First up, hardware.  The system is currently based on a Mac Mini 1.66 GHz Core Du0 with 2GB RAM, and a 500GB internal HDD– the old Mac Mini G4 became someone else’s audio server.  Anyway, the display is a Dell 2209WA 22″ IPS LCD, and the EyeTV 250 is still hanging on.  Input devices are split between a standard keyboard and mouse, which are used infrequently, an Apple remote, an iPod Touch and an iPad.  I’m still using the Air Mouse Mobile Mouse Pro iPod/iPad app, and have added Apple’s Remote app for controlling iTunes.

The EyeTV doesn’t get used a lot these days.  We don’t have cable or satellite, but instead get most non-locally-stored video from online sources.  The EyeTV is attached to an antenna/areal, but broadcast TV isn’t convenient and the quality leaves a lot to be desired.  The digital broadcast available in our area would be nice, but the EyeTV doesn’t have a digital tuner, and I’m not convinced the available content is worth the cost of a new tuner.  Instead, most of the networks here offer their TV programs as streaming video from their websites.  These streaming videos don’t fit into Front Row, but using a full-screen web browser plus Air Mouse is acceptable for the few TV shows that are watched.

The  audio and video stored locally is in iTunes and is accessible via Front Row.  Stored media include our family videos, music, podcasts and a few movies and TV shows.  Front Row is by far the most convenient way to access the “TV”, and is almost solely controlled with an Apple remote.   My only complaint would be the lack of Front Row support for the Apple Remote app for the iPod/iPad, but it is rare that I’d prefer to use this application instead of the physical remote, though I’d still like to have the option.

Aside from the media functions, the Mac Mini also hosts a virtual Microsoft Home Server running under VMware Fusion.  The Home Server has essentially replaced Trash Server, and has the added benefit of saving energy as the Mac Mini is more efficient than the old P4, and would be running anyway.

Remember that fast, new 2.5″ 7200RPM Seagate 500GB hard drive that I installed in Mac Mini No. 3?  Don’t bother, it is dead.  It gave no warning (sounds, clicks, errors, etc.), but it died none the less.  Just to make sure, I let Disk Warrior run for about five hours, and it too confirmed that the drive was dead.  Do you like my “screen shot”?

In a non-scientific study conducted on my twenty or so hard drives currently and recently in use, 100% of the failures have been Seagate drives.  The only other failure being a member disk in my RAID.  Aside from that, I have had some DOA Seagate drives.  I don’t dislike Seagate drives (yet), but I do still prefer Hitachi over most others.

That said, I replaced this Seagate with *gasp* a Western Digital.  I don’t and haven’t liked Western Digital drives since sometime in the early 1990s.  In fact, it has been so long that I don’t remember why I disliked them.  So, with no Hitachi drives immediately available, I got a WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM 500GB drive.  Based on my experience with OE Western Digital drives in Dells, this drive will either be fine, or grind itself into a noisy and expensive powder.  We will just have to wait and see.

What about the data?  Well, as with the RAID failure, I didn’t lose any data.  I use a combination of RAID, scheduled automated backups, and periodic off-site archiving to protect my data.  In this case, I used the scheduled automated backups, aka Time Machine, to recover my data.  The disk failure occurred sometime on the morning of 14 November.  I used a Time Machine backup from the evening of 13 November to restore the system.  The recovery process took three to four hours to restore approximately 300GB of data from an external FireWire 400 drive.  Additionally, Apple Mail required around a half hour to rebuild my inboxes, iPhoto performed some sort of maintenance, and for some reason the time zone had to be reset.

Overall, I didn’t lose any data and the dead drive was only a minor inconvenience.  In fact, the biggest problem I had was locating a SATA 500GB 2.5″ drive locally that was actually in stock.  I have some more details on the backup and archiving systems I use; perhaps they will show up in a future post…