iMac performance upgrade

[ian]

I remember when I put an SSD in my old c2011 Mac Mini. Blimey. It still runs as a little server under the stairs, but for a computer nearly a decade old, it's actually pretty decent. There's a 2 TB drive attached. To be honest, I'm not sure why it's there, there's a standalone NAS which is pretty empty, I just like it and it's the only computer I have with an optical drive. I'm compulsively hoarding empty space.

I have got a USB floppy drive somewhere. There must have been a reason.

I like to remember the good old days when firing up my work Windows 2000 system took so long I could go out and get a tea and a bacon roll in the meantime and have mostly eaten it by the time it stopped whurring away.

[Jaded]

Using Excel on a Mac Plus was fun too. Swapping two disks over endlessly.

[Greenbank]

Well on the way to a faster iMac - this just arrived in the post...


And this, folks, is what a terabyte of storage looks like in 2021. A whole fucking terabyte. Boggle.

Umm:-

[citoyen]

I like to remember the good old days when firing up my work Windows 2000 system took so long I could go out and get a tea and a bacon roll in the meantime and have mostly eaten it by the time it stopped whurring away.

My iMac was getting pretty much that bad, hence this thread.

[citoyen]

Umm:-

That's just silly. Really really silly.

ETA: Just looked up how much they cost... The price is pretty silly too!

[ian]

I just glanced and a 5 TB portable drive is about £125. Must. Resist. I'm spawning backups into infinite redundancy. So much space. I'm so old I remember when computer hard drives were measured in MB.

That said, I am impressed that my mothership project du jour is currently eating about 330 GB RAM.

[rafletcher]

I just glanced and a 5 TB portable drive is about £125. Must. Resist. I'm spawning backups into infinite redundancy. So much space. I'm so old I remember when computer hard drives were measured in MB.

Some 30 years ago I bought a 250MB hard drive. It cost £250.

[citoyen]

I'm so old I remember when computer hard drives were measured in MB.

Back when I were a lad, if you wanted to store data, you had to etch it into freezing cold gravel wi' nowt but yer bare hands.


This being my work computer, most of the important stuff is stored on the team dropbox, so I was tempted to save money by going for a smaller drive - 250GB would really have been more than enough (projects in progress never amount to more than 10GB). But then who ever regretted having too much disk space? I actually had to talk myself pretty sternly out of going for the 2TB option.

[Wowbagger]

I just glanced and a 5 TB portable drive is about £125. Must. Resist. I'm spawning backups into infinite redundancy. So much space. I'm so old I remember when computer hard drives were measured in MB.

Some 30 years ago I bought a 250MB hard drive. It cost £250.

When my main computer was a Commodore Amiga, I bought a hard drive for it at the Amiga Show in Earl's Court. 52mb, £450 or thereabouts.

We bought that computer in 1989, I think. Everything still works.

[Jaded]

I once bought a scsi cd writer for £600

[ian]

I had some Seagate magneto-optical behemoth that connected via the parallel printer port. Consequently, it offered the same sort of spritely data read/write performance as chiselling hieroglyphs into a stone tablet. I remember buying it from some maze-like electronics shop in NYC that I can't remember the name of (somewhere off Broadway, south of Houston, down towards the Manhattan Bridge) though I can't remember why. It was surely important. Probably porn, it's always porn, though I'm sure it couldn't have been more than low res gifs in those days. Whatever memory I have, it's evidently less than my computer.

I think it offered up to 250MB on swappable disks, which were conceptually awesome (until Zip drives came along, about one day and a one quarter of the price later). Or would have been, I think they manufactured about six of these disk cartridges, and each cost more than the drive itself and could only be obtained by presenting yourself in Tokyo and fighting with swords for the honour of taking one home. Hey, don't knock it, 500 MB is a lot of gifs.

[citoyen]

Zip drives came along, about one day and a one quarter of the price later

Zip drives, you say?



Tempted to fire it up to see what is on the disks but I doubt it's anything as interesting as porn.

[Wowbagger]

I had one of those as well. I think that has died, and all the discs with it.

[hubner]

Well on the way to a faster iMac - this just arrived in the post...


And this, folks, is what a terabyte of storage looks like in 2021. A whole fucking terabyte. Boggle.

Umm:-

That Samsung SSD would be mostly empty space inside, no?

[Greenbank]

You might get slightly better read/write performance out of the SSD than the SD card.

[Jaded]

Aaahhh, Zip disks.

Where are mine?

[Feanor]

Zip drives came along, about one day and a one quarter of the price later

Zip drives, you say?



Tempted to fire it up to see what is on the disks but I doubt it's anything as interesting as porn.

Ah, your pron is safe; its encrypted using a write-only technology.
*click* *click* *click*

[Kim]

*click* *click* *click*

*shudder*

[grams]

*click* *click* *click*

It's spelt Clik!

[ian]

I think my PhD data sits on a pile of Zip drives in a shoe box somewhere, which dates me. I'm not sure why I keep this stuff. Like, am I really going to need that data? Hi ian, this is the Nobel prize commitee, just a few formalities before we sign off, but you do have your HPLC data from October that year don't you? Maybe I really want to rework a couple of hot chapters from my thesis. I actually wrote it so every chapter was a cliffhanger. Seriously, the examiners loved it. My entire viva was spent discussing this and the meaning of cleavage.

[Kim]

Which (in combination with an email from cron that I've been ignoring) has reminded me to run the monthly offline backup script.  My dissertation was generally considered to be a bit of a flop, but the Clippy-crashing neural-net-in-an-Excel-sheet may be our last, best hope in defeating Skynet, so I keep it handy just in case.

[Robh]

Yoinks! Absolutely gobsmacked how much difference the SSD makes. 

I am just restarting my computer every five minutes for the fun of it now. 

Really simple process to set it up as well. Took about 40 minutes to clone the whole drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, then just told System Preferences to use the new disk for startup. Job done.

Thanks for the advice, folks. 

Might still upgrade the internal disk and memory some time in the future, but this will certainly do for now!

I'm afraid to tell how long my cloning took using CCC ... but I've just rebooted to the SSD and I am really quite pleased with the results so far

[citoyen]

I'm afraid to tell how long my cloning took using CCC ... but I've just rebooted to the SSD and I am really quite pleased with the results so far

How much data though? My hard drive had just 140GB on it when I cloned it.

Of course, I realised halfway through the job that I could have reduced it even further if I’d offloaded all the files that were just synced local copies of stuff on Dropbox and google drive.

I’ve now ordered an ssd for my wife’s Mac Mini too. No screen to remove makes an internal upgrade a much more straightforward job there.

[ian]

If it's anything like my Macbook, a chunk of that 140 GB will be old versions of Abode stuff (I found several versions of everything back to 2017, the option to delete old versions of the apps was off – that's another Adobe headache, they don't version their applications, they put out a new one every year).

I upgraded a Mac Mini and I've nearly zero competence.

[citoyen]

I upgraded a Mac Mini and I've nearly zero competence.

I watched a video. I think that makes me officially an expert.

I'm generally quite good at computer housekeeping and have removed all the old versions of Adobe shit I don't need. Also run CCleaner occasionally. If it ever turns out I've deleted a file I really need that badly, I'll just ask Vladimir Putin for a backup.