PwrMac

I’m not the usual speed freak, and I actually buy Macs that are a few years old. My last machine  was a G4 PowerBook I bought in 2006, and now I have a G5 tower I purchased in the beginning of this year. My Macs have to be fast and responsive. Although one might think a G5 tower from 2004 (a low end dual 1.8Ghz at that)  wouldn’t be able to even come close the performance of a lowly Core 2 Duo Mac Mini (This misconception promoted mainly by the GeekBench benchmark, which I feel is a horrible way to gauge performance…ah, a Blog for another day) they would be wrong. Yes, this requires some upgrading, and no, I’m not talking just about the much-suggested Ram upgrade (although it is important). A fast hard drive can make your machine as responsive as a new Mac, and responsiveness to me is what makes a computer fast. If your Mac boots in 46 seconds, launches Apps within seconds, executes core animations smoothly, and can handle 8+ applications without a hiccup, would you really want a new one?

A fast hard drive speeds things up for two reasons. The first and most obvious is the fact that it will be able to find and read information more quickly, cutting down on load times. The second I think is overlooked. Virtual Memory is essentially hard drive space used as  (slow) ram. In the unfortunate event this happens (and in today’s computing world, its impossible to avoid at some point) a fast hard drive will make up for some of the lag time as Virtual Memory is used.

The two main things that affect  disk performance is seek time (how fast the drive finds stuff) and sustained read speed (the average speed the drive spits stuff out). A drives rotational speed, measured in RPMs, mainly affects its seek performance. The faster the platters in the hard drive spin, the faster it can find information. A drives size affects read speed. Greater capacity means that data is stored more densely, allowing information to be read faster. Most of today’s desktop drives are 7,200 to 10,000 RPMs. The 10,000 RPM drives are far more expensive and tend to be on the small side of capacity, although they obviously faster. The most common 10k drives are the Raptor series from Western Digital. The price and size of these drives prohibited me from using them as a candidate in my system. This narrowed my selection to the 7200 RPM drives, the most popular. There are many, many options here, and although typically the larger drives are the fastest thanks to the denser platters, there was one drive for me that stood out. The 640Gb hard drive from Western Digital has shown in many benchmarks to be nearly as fast as the 1Tb (1000Gb) drives, the current performance kings. This is thanks mainly due to the fact that the 640Gb capacity is reached by using just 2 320Gb platters. The drive can be found on NewEgg.com for under $100, making this the obvious choice for me. It’s also important to point out that you should also consider how much cache the drive you choose has, as you should look for something that has nothing less then 16Mb.

Ram, naturally, is the upgrade of choice for most users. But determining how much ram is important. To do that, open up Activity Monitor in your utilities folder, select “System Memory” (from under the process window) and take a look. Page Outs is the most important number here. On my Mac, with 3Gb of Ram, I haven’t paged out once after my system has been up for 4 days, and while I was running six programs. After a normal day of usage, take a look at your page outs. The general rule of thumb is Page Outs should be 20% of Page In’s. If by the end of the day you see very little page outs, then you’ll gain absolutely nothing by upgrading your memory, and don’t have anyone else tell you otherwise. Having said all that, it’s my opinion that a normal user should need about 1.5Gb of Ram if your using Mac OS 10.4, and 3gb of Ram with 10.5.

These two upgrades can help your machine keep up with the latest and greatest from Apple. If you need proof, here are some videos of my system in action:

It takes me 46 seconds to boot fully:

Coverflow images load instantly:

This is the real stress test:

Here I am running Virtual PC 7 (with Windows XP running within the emulation enviroment), Safari under Windows XP, iChat, iTunes, Mail, Safari, Word 2008, Google Earth, Activity Monitor, and Aperture. That’s 10 applications. Google Earth, Virtual PC 7, and Aperture are the most resource hungry of the 10. First up is Google Earth, where I navigate to Philadelphia without a hiccup ( I had the 3-D buildings option on as well). Next I switch to Virtual PC 7 running Windows XP, where I launch Safari for Windows and navigate to Apple’s web site. Up next is some simple editing to a picture of a G5 with Aperture. Finally I switched  to iTunes. I started playing some music and switch to Cover Flow to demostrate is still scrolls fluidly, and loads cover art instantly. The rest of the movie show cases various iTunes visualizers, all of which run smoothly. The last 10 seconds or so I switch back to Virtual PC 7 and zoom in on the Start menu to clearly show its XP.

My Mac does all that and remains responsive. Its four years old, and its also the third slowest G5 Power Mac ever built (only the single 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz models are slower). It’s funny to me that people are quick to consider old computers slow. If my Mac is slow, you’d never know it.

- Brian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 3:11 pm and is filed under How-To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.