I decided on what to do about the iMac harddrive situation mentioned in Finding a good Thunderbolt disk: I ordered a Seagate GoFlex thunderbolt adapter and caddy, containing a 1TB drive, which I’m going to replace with a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO drive.

That means that I’m not going to get the 550 MB/sec of the Samsung drive, but about 330 MB/sec where the SATA/Thunderbolt adapter caps out. I’m sad about that, and I’m also sad that I couldn’t find a SATA/Thunderbolt 2 adapter at any half-decent price (not that anything Thunderbolt is decently priced, but I mean not ridiculously stupidly priced)

It was a toss-up between the Lacie and this one, but believe it or not, the built-in Thunderbolt cable came in as a minus for the Lacie, as I don’t know how I’d go further if it would break. Also, the Lacie didn’t disclaim what disk was in there. With my combination, at least I know I can move the disk into the computer or into another enclosure if it turns out I am really sad about the performance drop. I expect to keep the disk around longer than the enclosure.

So, waiting for the mailman to come, and dreading the stupid US/EU import-tax (I expect to be writing about that later) and taxing charges.

I was happy to run into José Valim at Goto Aarhus this year. I asked him about the many web frameworks for Elixir and which one to choose. His response was that most are abandoned in favour of Phoenix. Phoenix was on my shortlist from before, so I will be spending some time writing myself back to Elixir with Phoenix.

Finding a good Thunderbolt disk

Wow, the 5K iMac is a beauty! Like so many Mac users I’ve been dreaming about a retina iMac since around the iPhone 4 days (man, was that only 2011?) expecting my 2011 Sandy Bridge iMac to be ancient history for long. Now that it’s here, I’m not getting it. My iMac is still great, and I want to hold out for the Skylake architecture (thus even giving Broadwell a pass).

My iMac has an SSD that I used to build a custom Fusion Drive, but I still am not happy with the performance. So I want a more modern SSD, more precisely I want a Samsung 840 EVO0. I was holding out until after the October event to make any decisions, but now it’s time.

I could open my iMac and replace the spinning disk altogether. However, that will make the temperature sensors go nuts and spin up my fans that I then will have to override in software. That’s viable for me, I guess, but would impact resales opportunities if I wanted to trade it in at some point. (not sure I will want to)

I could get an internal enclosure, remove my Superdrive and replace it with the disk enclosure. Again I’d have to open my iMac and do modifications that will impact resale opportunities. I don’t use the superdrive much, so it’s a tempting solution.

More tempting, though, is to have a Thunderbolt enclosure with the SSD and boot of it. Thunderbolt should be able to reach the ~540MB/sec I/O of the SSD and have capacity to spare. If I popped it into a Thunderbolt 2 cabinet, I’d have a lot of future options. Yes, I expect this solution to be pricyer, but I can then take ’my machine’ with me and hook it up to other computers to boot of if I’m travelling and prefer to have my own setup. Not a bad idea. And when I get my new iMac in 2016 or so, I can use the disk there.

Problem is, where are those Thunderbolt 2 enclosures? I’d like one that’s BUS powered, since that should be able to drive the SSD just fine, and preferably I’d like two ports for daisy-chaining if possible. And a USB3 port just in case would be neat, although I don’t expect to be needing it.

I have found a couple of enclosures that look tempting: Buffalo Ministation3, Lacie Rugged2 and Seagate GoFlex1. What they all have in common, though, is that when set up with the Samsung 840 EVO, they run at ~340 MB/sec. This is what I expect for Serial ATA 300, not Serial ATA 600, which the disc is. Can it really be the case that all three adapters run with Serial ATA 300 instead of Serial ATA 600? If so, where is the Thunderbolt 2 case with Serial ATA 600 I am looking for? Is no-one making that? For a reasonable buck, anyway?

So I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

I just received a Xiaomi Mi3, chinese Android phone, for a work project, and wanted to put it in developer mode. Most guides are for Android 4.2 and 4.3, but this one had version 4.4.2. The guides advice to tap 7 times the Android version, but that will just give you a really weird easter-egg. Instead, tap the build version seven times, and it will go into development mode.

Now that I’m working on my blog, I get to go through my previous blog posts. It’s kind of having a chat with the me from the past. :-)

I’d like to have a quick comment on Minus points for the 2011 iMac. All I said there holds true. And you know what? I got a couple of Mac Minis added to that office. And they are gone again. First I used one for my TV, then I had one in my closet as a scanning server. I detached it. Now, I must admit, I don’t know where it’s gone. It’s been gone a while. Probably to a better place where it’s actually used.

I also got the MacBook Air. It was a fantastic machine! I would use my iMac as a screen. Then I would boot my iMac of the Macbook Air via Thunderbolt. Then my Air wouldn’t boot, and finally the hard drive gave in, in all its SSD’ish glory. There was no Air to pick up its place, since i had gotten more picky in the process. So now I’ve had a Macbook Pro for a year. And I still use my iMac daily.

My iMac is a decent computer. I even made it a home-made Fusion-drive since I had the SSD. These days, I’m really considering extending its life with a 1TB SSD (Samsungs 840 EVO probably). I’m not quite sure on how to handle it, though. I wanted it to boot of Thunderbolt, but for now it looks like perhaps I’m taking out the DVD drive instead and using the space for that via OWC.