Samsung 840 Pro performance in Mac Mini i7 Late 2012

Samsung 840 Pro BlackMagic Disk Speed Test result
I’ve just installed the 256Gb version of Samsung 840 Pro into my Mac Mini 2.3Ghz i7 (Macmini6,2) running OS X 10.8.4 Mountain Lion and am drooling all over its performance: 520MB/s read and 499MB/s write, and that’s with 150Gb of data already on it!

To my knowledge, this is the fastest SSD you can buy for your Mac Mini, and Amazon has it currently listed at $230.48 with free shipping. You will also need some kind of upgrade kit that includes the UPPER bay SATA cable (at least for the late 2012 model that I have) if you plan to keep the original hard drive. The OWC Data Doubler SSD/2.5″ Hard Drive Installation Kit for Mac mini 2011-2012 Models worked great in my case and it’s only $32.51 on Amazon at the moment.

As a bonus to this article, here is the icon file for the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Just unzip it, open the icns file in the Preview app, Select All, Copy, open the Get Info window for the drive, click the default hard disk icon and Paste the custom icon into it.

Enable dual screen support on AMD Radeon 6870 under OS X 10.8

To enable the dual screen support on a multi-monitor Hackintosh equipped with an AMD Radeon HD 6870 under OS X Mountain Lion (this works with the current 10.8.4 too), enter the following shell code into your Terminal session:

sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x00\x04\x00\x00\x04\x03\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x12\x04\x05\x01\x00\x04\x00\x00\x04\x03\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x22\x05\x04\x02\x00\x08\x00\x00\x04\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x11\x02\x06\x04\x00\x02\x00\x00\x14\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\x05\x04\x00\x00\x00\x04\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x11\x02\x01\x03|\x00\x04\x00\x00\x04\x03\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x12\x04\x04\x01\x00\x04\x00\x00\x04\x03\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x22\x05\x05\x02\x00\x08\x00\x00\x04\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x11\x02\x06\x04\x00\x02\x00\x00\x14\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x03\x05\x04\x00\x00\x00\x04\x02\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x11\x02\x01\x06|g' /System/Library/Extensions/ATI6000Controller.kext/Contents/MacOS/AMD6000Controller

This is a single line of a code, mind you. After the patch completes, rebuild the system cache using the following commands or any other method you prefer:

sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
kextcache -system-caches

Reboot, and you’ll have dual screen support.

LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 20Tb Blackmagic Disk Speed Tests

LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 10Tb and 20Tb models are the latest storage solutions available for video production professionals. The Thunderbolt interface virtually unlocks the bandwidth limitation for the connected appliances, making the transfer speeds limited only by the underlying storage adapter and media capabilities.

LaCie 5big ThunderboltThe LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 20Tb model comes with 5 preinstalled Seagate Barracuda XT 4Tb 7200RPM ST4000DX000-1CL160 hard drives that are able to push up to 180MB/s sequential read/write speeds on a single drive. Unfortunately there is no RAID5/6 support, but you can mix RAID1 and RAID0 groups via the Disk Utility. Continue reading

The hunt for the fastest SSD: Winter 2013 edition

In the market for a SSD replacement of your mechanical hard drive? Are you tired of synthetic benchmarks and holy wars in SSD forums? I’ve got some pure numbers here for the most popular models: Samsung 830, OCZ Vertex 4, Crucial M4 and the new Samsung 840 Pro, all tested under Mac OS X 10.8.2 with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.

Continue reading