An External SSD to Boot My iMac

I’m using a Mid 2011 27" iMac at work. When I ordered it back in May of last year, the SSD option would’ve prolonged the delivery estimate by a whopping 4 weeks, which, for an impatient person, is a hefty trade-off, so I passed and ordered the internal 1TB SATA drive only.

But, as they say, once you went SSD somewhere, you’re not going back.

While the machine was definitely fast and usable for the first couple of months, I missed the speed of an SSD soon enough when switching back and forth between my MacBook Air and the iMac at work, especially at boot time and sleep/wake. So I certainly was more than happy when LaCie announced in June that their Little Big Disk would ship with Thunderbolt-connectivity and an SSD inside. This would allow me to get back onto the sacred SSD path while not making me jump through a plethora of suction-cup laden hoops in order to replace the internal drive of my iMac with an aftermarket SSD. (And that’s not even guaranteed to work in the first place, after all.)

Not being located in the land of milk and honey, for the longest time the Thunderbolt version of the Little Big Disk was available in Germany only in its 1TB and 2TB SATA configurations. Finally, though, the 240 GB SSD version went on sale in recent weeks and I got my copy a couple of days ago.

Despite being advertised as a 240GB disk, it actually consists of a striped set of two 120GB SSD drives inside its aluminum chassis. It does not have any on-board RAID intelligence though and simply resorts to Mac OS X’s built-in software RAID functionality. Using Disk Utility, you can reconfigure the Little Big Disk to work as a mirrored set (RAID-1) instead, giving you only 120GB of capacity. Or you can opt to simply use the two drives as individual disks.

To connect the chassis to your Mac, you’ll need to bring your own Thunderbolt cable, since LaCie does not include any cables with its boxes¹. Also of note is the fact that the Little Big Disk needs its own power brick, as, apparently, the 10W of supplied bus power through the Thunderbolt bus is not sufficient to power it².

Of course I was curious about the performance of the cute little box, even though the theoretical speeds of 20Gbit/s of the Thunderbolt bus would hardly be the limiting factor. When I had everything wired up to one of the two Thunderbolt ports of my iMac, I fired up the Black Magic Disk Speed Test and got quite satisfactory results of 250MB/s write speed and 480MB/s read speed, respectively. My Late 2010 MacBook Air, by comparison, clocks in at roughly 100MB/s write and 140MB/s read speed on its internal SSD.

Quite happy with the results I fired up SuperDuper and cloned my internal SATA boot drive onto the Little Big Disk, the former certainly being the limiting factor in this operation.

After setting the external SSD as the new boot drive I rebooted my iMac and then designated the internal SATA drive to be the Time Machine backup drive. At 1TB capacity, it’s giving me more than enough room to store both a significant Time Machine history as well as my iTunes library files on it³.

Given the Time Machine backups I kept my setup on the default stripe-set configuration, giving me the full 240GB of SSD capacity.

At this point, applications launch with a single “bounce” in the Dock, running test suites of my various Rails and Python projects are crazy fast, and, despite the speed increase, my workplace didn’t get any noisier due to the almost complete silence of the Little Big Disk.

Conclusion

As an aftermarket option to speed up an existing system I can highly recommend the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 240GB SSD. While it does have its price tag ($900 for the disk and $50 for the cable), adding a 256GB SSD built-to-order option to a new iMac (in addition to the default internal 1TB drive) also sets you back $600, so it’s not that much more. Plus, you could theoretically boot any Thunderbolt-equipped Mac from the external SSD should your iMac give you hardware trouble one day.

1. This meant another trip to the local Apple Store for me, getting one of Apple’s own $49 Thunderbolt cables. ↩

2. Yes, the Little Big Disk sits in the “Mobile Hard Drives” category on LaCie’s website. ↩

3. Since this is the work iMac and since most of my music can be streamed via iCloud or internet radio stations, my needs for a bigger media drive are pretty much zero. ↩

Dude, Where Is My App?

In the last week, a lot has been written about (mis-)management of iOS multitasking and the potentially poor user experience of using the iOS app switcher – the one you get to by double-clicking the home button on any iOS device since the release of iOS 4. This was originally started by Fraser Speirs and was continued, among others, by John Gruber both in writing and on The Talk Show.

This got me thinking about about an annoyance that I’m running into more and more often lately, which is the management of open applications on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

In his article, Fraser states:

[T]he iOS multitasking bar does not contain “a list of all running apps”. It contains “a list of recently used apps”. The user never has to manage background tasks on iOS.

On Mac OS X, by contrast, the application switcher, invoked with ⌘-Tab, does contain a list of all currently running apps, and running apps only. And it’s been that way since the release of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

However, with the advent of Lion, Mac OS X inherited some of the process management features that debuted on iOS before. Namely, suspend and resume, auto-saving, and automatic termination are now part of your every day life with Lion, just like they have been for so long on iPhones and iPads.

On iOS, starting from its very first release 5 years ago¹, applications get suspended from execution as soon as the user hits the home button. When you tap the application icon again, the app resumes where it left off (assuming it was a professionally developed app implementing the respective APIs) and it’d seem as if it had continued to run in the background. (Which it hasn’t, most of the time.)

When iOS is in a memory crunch, it will go through the list of suspended apps and purge them from memory, freeing it up for the active task at hand, such as a memory hungry game. This process is better shown than explained, and Fraser does a great job with a follow-up video.

Compare and contrast that with some of the new process management happening on Lion.

Apple applications like Preview and Quicktime, much to the annoyance of some of its users, use suspend and resume to the effect of having all your documents open again when you relaunch the application, be it a full system reboot or just quitting and relaunching the application.

Likewise, there’s no need to explicitly save a new document (or existing document, for that matter) to make your changes survive application relaunches. The system takes care of that behind the scenes.

Now, let’s talk about Automatic Termination. As outlined by John Siracusa in his epic Lion Review on Arstechnica:

Lion will quit your running applications behind your back if it decides it needs the resources, and if you don’t appear to be using them. The heuristic for determining whether an application is “in use” is very conservative: it must not be the active application, it must have no visible, non-minimized windows—and, of course, it must explicitly support Automatic Termination.

This description is apt (and it wouldn’t be by John Siracusa if it weren’t) — it does neglect, however, a few of the user experience niggles that come with the system’s application of the Automatic Termination feature.

If we recall, the app switcher on iOS allows you to switch between recently used apps and you need not care in which state those apps are. Backgrounded, suspended, not running, it’s all the same. If you tap an icon in the app switcher the app will become the active app. Either resumed from flash memory or started afresh.

As a heavy user of ⌘-Tab for application switching on Lion, however, you will encounter the situation where switching back and forth between applications will leave you with a double take wondering why on earth the application you were just switching from went the way of the dodo.

Preview.app for example, the all-in-one go-to application for media viewing on Mac OS X, naturally supports Automatic Termination because it’s one of the system’s default apps and as such a showcase for the implementation of new technologies².

So assume for a moment the hypothetical scenario that you’re preparing a document to be mailed to a colleague. You know you’ve already exported a PDF of the document but since it’s a temporary document you failed to properly file it and placed it somewhere temporary.

While Preview is open you switch to it and notice that your PDF copy of the document is not open anymore (neither is any other document). Hastily you switch over to the Finder by clicking once somewhere on your desktop to bring the Finder forward and check if you placed it on the desktop itself. But you didn’t, so you decide to go back to Preview by hitting ⌘-Tab and use the “Open Recent” menu item to go looking for your document some more.

Or so you thought.

Of course, with Preview being intermittently in the background with no open windows, there’s no way to get back to Preview with ⌘-Tab because it just disappeared from the app switcher, by means of being automatically terminated by the system. Since nobody I know keeps Preview in the dock, there’s no way to relaunch it that way either. Frankly, the application just completely disappeared from the user interface without clear means to launch it again.

The end result is that you pretty much end up using the Apple menu ( › Recent Items) to relaunch Preview, launch Preview from the Applications folder again, or use one of your favorite application launchers (and you know it’s Alfred) to do the same.

Undeniably, the example is very much made up. But you can certainly see how the current behavior of the Mac OS X ⌘-Tab switcher (and Dock) can catch users off guard. Neither the Dock nor the ⌘-Tab switcher show applications that you had consciously launched and which were then purposefully quit by the system without your awareness.

And Lion, which is at version 10.7.2 as of this writing, doesn’t necessarily perform automatic termination only when system resources get scarce, either. In fact, here’s a little demonstration video where the application being quit is the only one running (besides the Finder).

I do appreciate the majority of behind the scenes features in Lion and I made a conscious decision to not disable several of the new defaults like “upside down”-scrolling and restoring windows when quitting and re-opening apps. But this particular area sure has some room for improvement.

Nobody knows what Apple has³ up its sleeves for future point updates of Lion or even Mac OS X 10.8 and I’m curious what’s happening to both iOS app switching and Mac OS X app switching in future releases.

1. Pretty much to the day, as the original iPhone was introduced on January 9th, 2007. ↩

2. Save, maybe, for a skeuomorphic UI. ↩

3. Let’s not get into the other debate of the last week and call it “Apple have”. ↩

The Nikon D4 ∞

Rob Galbraith:

Nikon has announced the D4, a new pro digital SLR that features a 16.16 million image pixel full-frame CMOS image sensor, 10fps top shooting rate (or 11fps with restrictions), a standard ISO range of 100-12,800 (and an extended range of 50-204,800), a revised 51-point AF system capable of autofocusing with f/8 lenses, all-new 91,000-pixel RGB ambient/flash metering sensor, twin memory card slots (CompactFlash and the emerging XQD format), EXPEED 3 image processing, 1080p video capture with audio monitoring and optional uncompressed video export through the HDMI port, built-in Ethernet, a new EN-EL18 battery, in-camera HDR and timelapse creation, all in a dust and weather sealed magnesium alloy body.

Looks like a great upgrade, available in February of 2012 for a retail price of $5,999.

Anyone interested in a great condition D3?

Why do we pay sales commissions? ∞

Dan Ostlund, of Fog Creek Software:

Removing commissions has changed the sales team. It has taken their focus off their compensation. They have all that administration time back for more useful things. They take a longer view of the value of a prospect, and are less worried about who is going to buy right now. They feel less stress about taking vacation. They don’t quibble among themselves over accounts. And best of all, they feel more integrated with the company.

A very insightful read. It matches other recent studies, which prove how financial incentives actually reduced individual sales representatives' performance in several occasions. While that logic (or absence thereof) seems hard to grasp at first, it certainly is worth reconsidering the longstanding, agreed upon “fact” that sales people have to be paid a commission.

New Year's Resolution: Scan More!

I’m not stating anything earth-shattering by saying that we’ve been headed towards a less papery office for quite some time now. Buying stuff online gives you immediate, electronic, easily searchable¹ access to a proof of purchase in the form of receipts, license numbers for software, and even access to forms to return goods if the merchant decided to include a link to those in their order confirmations.

However, physical mail from more traditional outlets is still abound, even in 2012. Invoices from the doctor’s office, tax forms, your gas and electricity bills, all coming to your physical inbox.

Now, it’s one thing to process that physical inbox just like you process your electronic inbox. You act on things that need to be acted upon (paying the bills, filling out forms), throw away the pieces that don’t need archival, and then file those that you need to keep. But what about finding it again?

If you are anything like me, roaming the aisles of a supermarket looking for some random product without access to a search field on the upper right corner of the shelves makes you furious. Likewise, looking for that one invoice in one of those traditional, big, honking folders that you store somewhere in that dark corner of your basement? Totally enraging.

Furthermore, running my own small business with the help of an external accountant usually results in the invoices of the past twelve months not even being physically within reach when I need to grab one for a random warranty claim.

Scanning to the rescue

I grew up with flatbed scanners. Then flatbed scanners with automated document feeders bolted on. Then a variety of All-in-one devices. All of which got the job done of occasionally scanning a document, more or less successfully.² After emailing that document somewhere, it’d usually get deleted and not archived.

Given the premises above, I want to be able to scan each and every item reaching my physical inbox. In the longterm, I want to be able to shred the physical item and simply rely on the electronic copy being available. This required a more sophisticated product, more suitable for mass document scanning as well as one that is much more reliable and fault tolerant.

That said, last month I went and ordered a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500.³ (Portability was not of concern, otherwise the S1100 and S1300 would’ve been worthy contenders as well.)

The S1500 connects to your Mac or PC with USB. (Look no further than the N1800 if you need your scanner to be accessible over the network.) Installing the ScanSnap software is a pretty straight-forward task (despite the whopping 341MB download) and now you’re scanning.

And, boy, does it scan.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I was looking left and right for more stuff to scan after shoving the first batch of documents through the S1500. It scans both sides of the document simultaneously (without pulling the sheet through itself twice), corrects skew, flips the orientation the right way, doesn’t care about the size of the document (as long as it physically fits), and skips intermittent blank pages. It is awesome.

Storage considerations

Alright, now that we have a device to electronificize your documents, where do you put them? After all, the stated longterm goal was to get rid of the physical goods after scanning, so the system for archival of our scanned documents needs to be a trusted one.

Enter Evernote.

I’ve picked Evernote as my primary document storage system for a variety of reasons:

1. It gives me easy (and, again, searchable) access to my full document archive wherever I am. Home office? Check. At work? Check. In a hotel room with MacBook? Check. On the couch with iPad? Check. On the road with iPhone? Check.
2. It has very fair pricing policies. With a free account, you can store an unlimited number of notes at a maximum of 25MB each and a monthly upload limit of 60MB. A $45/year premium account doubles maximum note size and increases the monthly limit to 1GB. Assuming letter sized PDFs, a scanned page will be around 50-250KB (in color!), giving you enough bandwidth for several hundred pages per month even with the free account.
3. It’s incredibly well integrated with the ScanSnap software. By default, ScanSnap Manager has a profile for scanning directly into Evernote, complete with handing it already searchable PDFs⁴ and auto-naming.
4. It integrates with other devices as well, such as the Livescribe pens.
5. In addition to its powerful search, you can have a mild hierarchy in Evernote, separating personal and work documents for example, using separate notebooks and notebook stacks, with up to 250 notebooks in total.
6. With its ubiquitous syncing, you already have multiple copies of your documents synced to all of your devices and the Evernote servers. Additionally, you can automatically create off-site backups with tools like Backblaze or on-site with Time Machine. (See Evernote’s knowledge base for details.)
7. You can easily share individual notebooks with co-workers or spouses.

Most of this would, of course, also be possible with a less locked-in and more filesystem-bound approach like Dropbox, implementing your own document archival and naming process as well as relying on Spotlight for indexing. Do whatever suits your workflow best.

What (and when) to scan

In a nut: Everything.

You can always delete stuff later. But with a speedy device like the ScanSnap, get into the habit of simply throwing everything at it.

Empty your postbox daily, open all the envelopes, throw away the marketing shebang, scan the rest with the push of a button. Within seconds, all the documents are at your electronic fingertips, fully indexed.

Someone handed you a business card? Scan it. With OCR, you’ll be able to find it in your document archive with simple text search for their name.

I setup an “@Inbox” notebook as my default notebook in Evernote. This notebook is the destination for all my scans. Either right away, but at least once a day (after a gentle reminder by OmniFocus) I’ll go through that notebook and sort stuff into separate notebooks for easier retrieval when, for example, doing my monthly taxes.

In an attempt of consolidation, I’ll also shove receipts and invoices I receive electronically (by email or in the browser) into Evernote. That way I only have to check a single location for both my bank account statements and any bills I have received, no matter if electronically or physically.

Doing so is a simple enough act that you won’t even have to think twice after a couple of days. On a Mac, you can “Print PDF to Evernote” from every print dialog. (Although, if you installed Evernote from the Mac App Store or went through some weird upgrade bonanza, you may not have that option right away – this thread from the Evernote forums has a workaround.)

Given the searchable PDFs, you’ll be able to locate most documents without manually providing any additional meta data like tags. Usage of tags definitely is a balancing act between the amount of time required to file a document and the actual improved results finding it again.

Personally, I’m not an extensive “tagger”, although you can certainly go overboard with that in Evernote. One thing I do use tags for is to keep track of paid and unpaid invoices and for tacking merchant names onto inbound invoices.

Bonus tip: Mobile scanning with TurboScan

Wouldn’t it be great, when you’re out and about eating lunch with one of your loveliest customers, to scan the lunch receipt right there, on the go, without the risk of losing or wrinkling the paper when you lug it back home to your ScanSnap? Try Turboscan for iPhone, which works with your phone’s camera adjusting for lighting differences across the document, perspective corrections, and improving contrast. The results, while not as pitch perfect as the ScanSnap, are remarkable. Plus, you can send them right off to Evernote for archival purposes.

Conclusion

Do your future self a favor and start your journey towards a healthy electronic document archive today. The tools are readily available, both software and hardware, to accomplish the necessary tasks without much effort.

Additionally, ain’t shredding fun?

1. Like many that came before me, I stopped sorting archived email meticulously into separate folders and simply use one big “Archive” folder. The search functionality in Mail.app and Gmail is much faster than you trying to locate that one folder your email went into. ↩

2. This usually required scanning it three times due to document skew, feeding it to the scanner upside down or inside out because it wasn’t intuitive, or after resolving a paper jam somewhere. ↩

3. Don’t bother with the S1500M, which claims to be a “Mac version” of the same product that sells for a premium over the regular S1500 and just has additional bundled software you won’t need. The ScanSnap software package is available for free from Fujitsu’s website for both Mac and PC. ↩

4. Searching PDFs requires an Evernote Premium account. ↩