Truly Nerdy Gadget of the Day

If you’ve ever removed & replaced a hard drive from a computer, then wanted to transfer the data from the old HD, chances are you’ve had to use a spare external USB or FireWire drive enclosure to hook the removed HD to your computer.

No more!

Brando’s USB to SATA/IDE cable connects all 2.5″ and 3.5″ IDE and SATA drives (even optical ones!) to your computer.

I don’t have one (yet), but the reviews I’ve read look upon it quite favourably. Brando sells it for $35, but you can find it at other places for around $15. Hey, my birthday’s coming up in November!

What’s Taking Up All That Space?

Alexa asks:

I haven’t installed anything new. I haven’t added any large files to my computer. But I keep running low on hard drive space! How do I find out what is taking up all the room on my iBook?

Apple’s Finder doesn’t cut it. It’ll tell you how much space is left on your hard drive, but it doesn’t give you a bird’s eye view on what is taking up your hard drive space.

Enter Grand Perspective. This free application gives you an interactive, graphical “tree view” of your Mac’s hard drive.

Step 1: Download and install Grand Perspective.

Step 2: Select the hard drive of concern:
Step 3: Wait a few minutes for Grand Perspective to scan your hard drive
Step 4: Be overwhelmed by the graphical representation of your hard drive. (FYI, the largest block is my iPhoto library)
Step 5: Mouse over the larger blocks to find out what they are and how much space they’re taking up, then click on the blocks you don’t think you need, then click “reveal” to see where it is in the Finder
Step 7: Delete and repeat!

This is an awesome free app and I know it saved Alexa a huge headache; she found out that Azureus was taking up 7.5GB of space. Needless to say, she deleted Azureus and is now using Transmission and enjoying having almost 1/5th of her hard drive back!

note: There is a rhyme and reason behind the colours and groupings of the squares that Grand Perspective uses: Files in the same folders are grouped together, then folders that are in the same folders, etc.

Time Machine Drive Size (Mac)

Curtis asks:

I bought a new drive and am partitioning it to limit how much Time Machine uses. How big should I make the partition?

Short Answer: I’d say around 25% larger than what your computer’s hard drive size.

Backing up is SO important, and Apple’s new operating system includes a very powerful and easy to use application called Time Machine. All you need is an external drive to backup to, and you’re good to go!

To understand how much space you need, you should know how Time Machine works. The first time you backup, it backs up your whole hard drive. From then on when it backs up your computer, it only backs up what you’ve changed. Once your backup drive is full, you can set Time Machine to delete old backups.

My lappie’s drive is 120GB and my 160GB backup drive is EASILY big enough!

If you aren’t deleting/adding tons of files on a daily, or even weekly basis, a backup drive that’s slightly bigger than your hard drive, like 25%, is more than enough. That being said, hard drive space is CHEAP, and you’ll never wish you bought something smaller — A 500GB USB 2.0 drive from Future Shop is only $119!

Figuring Out the Speed Of Your Hard Drive

Alessia writes:

How can i check the speed of the hard disk drive in my macbook pro. Im not sure if its 5400 rpm or 7200rpm. I couldn’t find it on the section “about this mac”

You’re not alone in trying to find this. It would be very nice if Apple could somehow publish the speed of your drive in the ‘About This Mac’ specs on your computer. Here’s one way to figure it out though:

In the ‘About This Mac’ section, which it sounds like you’ve found but for those following at home you can find it by clicking on the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen:

… and then clicking on ‘More Info’

Look under the Serial-ATA section of the ‘Hardware’ area. You should see a brand and model of your hard drive listed. In my case, it’s a Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00:

Take that model number - again, mine is HTS541612J9SA00 but yours could be different brand/model number - and throw it into Google:

In my case I ended up at Hitachi’s web site (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm) and could see that my drive was listed in a series that has a 5400rpm spin speed.

Once you see all the rest of the specs there, you could probably figure out from your original part number what the seemingly random numbers/letters mean.

HTS541612J9SA00

For my MacBook Pro’s drive, the “54″ is probably referring to the speed (5400rpm), the 12 is short for 120GB and “SA” stands for Serial ATA.

Your mileage may vary as it all depends on which manufacturer and model of hard drive Apple decided to use in your laptop and whether or not that particular manufacturer maintains an online list of their hard drives.

How Can I Figure Out My Hard Drive Size?

Alvin writes:

How can I find out what size my Hard Drive is on my 15inch Macbook Pro.
Its processor speed only says 1.87???THANKS

One way to do this is by looking for the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop like this:

Right click (or CTRL-click if you’re using a single button mouse or a laptop) on the icon and you should see this:

Left click on ‘Get Info.’

The screen that appears next should have a bunch of information about your hard drive, and in the ‘General’ section (you may have to click the triangle to open up the information) you should see this:

The capacity on this computer states 111.47GB which is actually a 120GB hard drive (visit this wikipedia entry for an explanation of why the difference in sizes under the section titled ‘Consumer Confusion). It’s got 27.81GB available and 83.66GB used.