Fortysomething Geek

One of the most annoying thing is in OSX is when you are watching a full screen movie and an email notification slides in.

Notifications, in general are great, but sometimes, you want to temporary disable them.

Easy. Click on the option key while you mouse click the right pane notification bar.
When notifications are off, you will see a grey graph bar outline.

RamDisks have been used on Macs since the early mac classic days. A RamDisk is in essence a virtual disk using your available RAM. It will be faster than any HDD or SSD.

If you have a lot of RAM on your mac, you can easily make a RAMDisk in the terminal.

Here is how you make a RAMDisk:

 diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisk” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://xxxx’ 

Replace xxxx by the number of megabytes (MB’s) * 2048. For example, if you want a 8GB ramdisk, use 8192*2048 = 16777216. You can use whatever name you want for the mounted volume in double quotes.

Copies are insanely fast. Typical benchmarks tools like Black Magic cannot even run.




There are plenty of good use for ramdisks - scratch, working on projects like database with lots of I/O. Ramdisks are great at being source drives for testing the write speeds when benchmarking drives.

I had to use an external Thunderbolt bootable mac drive for the past 2 weeks and the experience has been great.
If you ever booted off Firewire or USB 2.0, the experience was horrible. You often felt like you were using a 2004 Macbook with a (削除) 5400 (削除ここまで) 4800 rpm hard drive. Even USB 3.0 operates fairs very poorly due to random reads/writes. Thunderbolt doesn't seem to have those lag issues and feels nearly native to me.

My early 2012 27" iMac went kaput so it went into service. Before it went in, I cloned the drive to a SSD. While the iMac was in the shop, I booted off the SSD via the Seagate (STAE121) Go-Flex Thunderbolt adapter. I simply plugged the drive into another iMac (and Macbook) and it just worked like usual. No need to install different drivers for different hardware or re-configure anything.

Booting off Thunderbolt is a dream. In fact, running off an external SSD was faster than booting off the normal internal 7200rpm hard drive. Mountain Lion boots in about 10 seconds off Thunderbolt.

Carbon Cloning (ghosting) a Mountain Lion OS with the full Adobe CS 5.5, MS Office, GIT, MySQL suite took less than 10 minutes. My working OS build was approximately 40GB in size so this is pretty fast. I did not suffer any sleep issues or drive disconnecting. The typical usage was 9-10 hours a day.
The only thing that was a slight concern was the Thunderbolt cables warming after extended use.



This is an ideal setup for someone who wants to run different versions of OS and Apps. For example, you can keep up to date with FCP X and have a fast bootable OS with just Final Cut 7 when you need it.

Striping two USB sticks was cool but I wanted to try it further with two fast SSDs.
As many people know, the Samsung 830s are fast, reliable and great SSDs. They make great candidates for a SSD based RAID.


In my search for a super fast consumer grade RAID solution, I figure I try USB 3.0 and see what happens next.

I did tests on both Mac OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.04 (off a Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 motherboard).

On the Mac. Making a stripe software raid-0 is pretty straightforward using Disk Utility.



In Ubuntu 12.04. Setup is almost as easy as the mac.





The results were not that great as the Thunderbolt solutions I've seen. In fact, I now think it is is more economical to get platter based spindle thunderbolt RAID drives instead of trying USB/eSATA with SSDs.

I'm getting 200 MB/s writes on both OSX/Linux and 200-300MB/s reads. Have in mind, these are blazing speeds if you only used to using regular HDDs. However, the results are unimpressive in a RAID-0 array.







In fact, I see no real speed gains striping two SSDs with USB 3.0. Single SSDs are just as fast.
Or simply, the USB 3.0 controllers are not up to speed with the fastest SSDs yet. This may explain why I haven't seen any interesting or worthwhile USB 3.0 RAID enclosures on the market.


I think I'm going to have to spend the cash on a Thunderbolt solution because eSATA and USB 3.0 is not cutting it for a DAS (Direct Attach Storage) solution.

What happens when you try to stripe two USB 3.0 sticks together in a RAID 0 on a 2012 Macbook with USB 3.0 support?


I decided to find out to see if there is any tangible benefit gains.


Here, I have two Patriot Supersonic Xpress 32GB USB 3.0 sticks for my test. I used Disk Utility to make a stripe set and had the set formatted HFS+. I ran Black Magic Disk Speed Test to see the before and after differences.



Single USB stick benchmark.


Striped Zero RAID benchmark.



In short, you will get twice the speed in RAID 0. Pretty cool!

Anandtech first reported that the new 2012 Ivy Bridge Macbook Pros support the USB 3.0 Attached SCSI protocol (aka UASP). I decided to test it for a spin and try it out for myself.

You can think of UASP as a supercharged version of USB 3.0. Faster and better bang for the buck (lower CPU utilization).

UASP promises faster transfer speed with SCSI like protocol, eliminating the previous BOT (Bulk-Only Transport) method of USB transfer. Prior, USB was notoriously known for sucking up CPU resources during copies. There is quite a bit overhead with BOT and UASP solves this. In short, USB 3.0 devices with UASP are faster than regular, traditional BOT USB 3.0 implementations.

You need a host and a device that both support the protocol to realize any benefits of UASP.

The only USB3 - SATA dock that I know of that supports UASP is the Thermaltake Blac X 5G which I have in my possession. The dock requires a firmware upgrade to unlock the UASP features.
It is a rather nice dock that is similar to the Voyager Q but only supports USB. You can use 2.5 and 3.5" drives. It also comes with some handy drive covers to keep it clean and tidy looking.

I previously used quad interface (firewire400/800/esata/usb) NewerTech Voyager Q but I had so many problems that I switched to the Blac X. The Blac X doesn't get much notice in the Mac community and the Voyager Q's popularity is due to the fact OWC sells it as their main SATA dock.

For mid 2012 Macbook Air/Pro/Retina owners, it is now time to look at the Blac X.



My initial impression of the Blac X wasn't that favorable due to the fact it perform rather so-so under Lion (OSX 10.7). It was not giving me the speed improvement compared to using a Seagate USB3.0 to Sata Go-Flex adapter. In fact, I was ready to return it until Mountain Lion was released.

Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8) changed all that. I don't have a reasonable explanation but it is definitely faster. Possibly, Apple had more resources to optimize their USB 3.0 drivers for Mountain Lion rather than concentrating on Lion. Whatever the reasons, the Blac X 5G's performance under 10.8 is very good.

First, compared to other docks and SATA interfaces I've used, CPU utilization running test and large copies were under 5% versus 7-10% on others. Could this be UASP at work?

My tests consisted of using a Crucial M4 Sata 6 SSD. I tried formatting HFS+, exFAT and FAT32.

My initial tests under Lion was a bit of a disappointment as seen below. 135.5 MB/s reads from a SSD.



With a Go-Flex adapter, I had better performance under Lion


With a 5400 rpm Toshiba Drive (the one that came with my Macbook) and the Blac X perfomed like any other dock. This may be due to the bottleneck of the 5400rpm drive because the using a Go-Flex adapter gave me similar results.


For platter drives, as I mentioned in my other posts, USB 3 and Firewire 800 are pretty close. It is only with SSDs you see the major benefits of USB 3.

With Mountain Lion now officially released, I decided to do the tests again.

Here it is with the Crucial M4 again. As you can see, it is a big improvement. 268.2 MB/s reads and 179 MB/s writes via USB 3. The Blac X 5G is definitely now worth the investment.




Compared to the Go-Flex,there is little change between Lion and Mountain Lion. As you can see the, the Blac X is definitely much faster now under Mountain Lion.


There you have it. Mountain Lion brings in some new speed optimizations for Macs with USB 3.0.

Update 2012年10月07日.

It seems 10.8.2, it is even faster. Read my update with video here:

http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2012/10/blacx-5g-usb-30-update-fastest-usb-30.html