#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.