#storage

Use the Cavalry 2TB CADA002SA2-B External Drive in OS X and Windows

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I recently pur­chased an exter­nal drive to upgrade from my West­ern Dig­i­tal My Book 500GB Essen­tial Edi­tion. I needed the upgrade as I am plan­ning to upgrade the hard drive on my Mac­Book Pro some time this year to at least a 500GB (from a 120GB). I decided to go with the Cav­alry 2TB CADA002SA2-B exter­nal drive (aka. CADA-SA2).

It was sell­ing for a good price (~1GB/$1) a cou­ple of weeks ago. That and hav­ing the addi­tional eSATA inter­face helps with trans­fer­ring huge files (3.0Gbps vs 480Mbps, about 6.25x faster). Any­ways, my My Book was cur­rently setup with the fol­low­ing partitions:

  • 120GB for HFS+. I just use SuperDuper1 once or twice in a month, and/or when I want to do a OS X update, to have a bootable backup just in case of Murphy’s Law.
  • And the rest, 380GB for­mat­ted on NTFS. I use that space for back­ing up music, pho­tos, videos, appli­ca­tion install files, etc. both for Win­dows and OS X

I some­what wanted to do the same with the Cav­alry, but I’ve read on their site and their man­ual that it doesn’t work on OS X 10.5+. Luck­ily, some­one posted a review on NewEgg that they have suc­cess­fully got­ten it to work with Leopard.

You can get this drive to work on Mac OS 10.5. The way Cav­alry Tech sup­port told me to do it was to find a OS 10.4 machine, for­mat it on that and then plug it into the 10.5 machine. All I did was put in my old 10.4 disc, boot from the CD and use disk util­ity to for­mat it. How­ever, if you don’t have a way to boot OS 10.4 you are pretty much stuck.

I hope that helps for those who decide to get the same exter­nal stor­age and use it with your Mac products.

  1. SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed pro­gram that makes recov­ery pain­less, because it makes cre­at­ing a fully bootable backup pain­less. [↩]

Western Digital’s Digital Home Tour

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Just received word that West­ern Dig­i­tal will be com­ing to San Fran­cisco on Thurs­day, Octo­ber 30th to show­case their new tech­nolo­gies, part of the “Dig­i­tal Home Tour”.

Thurs­day, Octo­ber 30, 2008
4-8pm
@ W Hotel
181 Third Street
San Fran­cisco, CA 94103

If you would like to attend the event, you may RSVP via wdc.com/wddigitalhome

Adium Chat Transcripts Location

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This applies to those using the ever-popular IM client, Adium.

Adium is a free instant mes­sag­ing appli­ca­tion for Mac OS X that can con­nect to AIM, MSN, Jab­ber, Yahoo, and more.

If you are in a sit­u­a­tion were you would need to back up your chat tran­scripts due to account migra­tion, or in need to do a clean instal­la­tion of your OS X machine, here’s where to start:

~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs

Note: This is cur­rent as of Leop­ard OS X 10.5.4, and Adium 2.x.

Box.net Relaunches

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I was for­tu­nate enough to get invited by Aaron Levie to test Box.net’s “Early Adap­tor Pre­view” this past week­end. I couldn’t blurt any­thing till after the 22nd about it. But yah, I almost for­got as I’ve been busy enjoy­ing my Mon­day off from work.

Any­ways, so far so good. Here’s a cou­ple of my find­ings from the getgo:

  • Sooth­ing and attrac­tive color palette
  • UI upgraded to be 2.0-friendly
  • Right-click (after log­ging in) pops up a Box.net menu. A dis­ad­van­tage I guess, at least for me. Your browser’s right-click menu options won’t work. For exam­ple, Screen­grab FF exten­sion to take a cou­ple of screen­shots. Note: I men­tioned this to Aaron, he said that they might give an option to have it enabled/disabled later on.
  • Upload­ing. At first, I thought the Upload-tab was going to change the actual page (com­ing from the Browse-section). It actu­ally just pops up a layer onto the view­port with its con­tent. If you are com­ing from any­where else other than the Browse-section and clicked on Upload-tab, you are actu­ally redi­rected to the Browse-section first and need to click on Upload-tab again to do the actual upoad. Note: As Aaron pointed out through email, this is more of a “usabil­ity” thing and should be addressed later on.

    Sec­ond, I thought the “drag-and-drop” was actu­ally func­tional so I tested an image file and dragged it to the browser win­dow, only to be greeted by the pre­view of the image itself. That is, the browser chang­ing its URL to the local files. “Oops.” Didn’t know the “drag-and-drop” text was a link which pops up a win­dow (Java applet) for the actual drag-and-drop.

    Besides the above, I found that rel­a­tively easy and intu­itive to upload your files. Granted it ain’t there ain’t no Win­dows file-transfer ani­ma­tion, but its direct to the point—to get your files as fast and as safe as pos­si­ble from your hard-drive to their server(s).

I’ll post some screen­shots later today. It’s so purty believe me. As for now, you may get a glimpse through this Box.net shared-folder, or via Box.net’s blog entry about the relaunch.

Note: Here are some pod­cast inter­views with Aaron Levie: a) by Gear Live, and b) Ven­tu­rus.