FireWire or USB-Connected Hard Disk Drives? – Choosing Right Hard Disk Drives

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FireWire USB hard disk drives Mac

We know that in general FireWire-connected hard disk drives have faster data transfer rates than USB-connected drives. That’s what we always hear at Apple’s Discussions except we have never seen actual numbers compared. If true, how faster are FireWire-connected hard disk drives, anyway? Those questions must have been raised 8 or 9 years ago. But let’s revisit this topic again. Another question that you may have is whether or not USB-connected hard disk drives are so bad that one should avoid buying them.

FireWire USB hard disk drives Mac
Screenshot 01 – Source: coneco.net		   FireWire USB hard disk drives Mac
Screenshot 02 – Source: coneco.net

USB-connected hard disk drives are a lot cheaper than FireWire-connected ones. There’s a good Japanese website called coneco.net where you can compare prices of electronics products. Let’s look up 320 GB drives. The cheapest USB-connected drive that we find is Maxtor OneTouch III USB 2.0. (See Screenshot 01.) The price is 7,980 yen. It’s about US$74. And the cheapest FireWire-connected model for 320 GB drives is Maxtor OneTouch III Firewire 400 / USB 2.0. The price is 13,000 yen. It’s equivalent to US$120.40. (See Screenshot 02.)  Continue reading →

Briefly: Apple Releasing Security Update 2008-004 for OS 10.4 Tiger and OS X 10.5.4 Update

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TOKYO (MacHouse) – It’s been only one month since Apple, Inc. released the last security patch. Yesterday, the company released Security update 2008-004 for Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. Meanwhile, Apple also released the software update for OS X 10.5. Details are unknown for the security patch.






Click on the button for more information on Security Update 2008-004 for OS 10.4 (PPC). VTC
Click on the button for more information on Security Update 2008-004 for OS 10.4 (Intel Mac). VTC
Click on the button for more information on OS X 10.5.4 Update (PPC & Intel Mac). VTC

iMac G5 2 GHz Diary – Is It Dead or Alive?

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iMac G5 2 GHz (Ambient Light Sensor) has been our main machine for the past two and a half years. We have whipped it and made it compress close to a thousand QuickTime and Flash videos. Life is never easy for this iMac. We expected that its life expectancy would be short. So we thought the zero day would come pretty soon.

In the meantime, we use an external FireWire hard disk drive to back up files while the internal drive only contains Mac OS and application files. In this way, we can access important files even when our iMac dies.

Alien Skin Exposure 2 for Mac video tutorial
Screenshot 1 – Network Status		   Alien Skin Exposure 2 for Mac video tutorial
Screenshot 2 – Network Configurations

Day 1

Something unexpected happened yesterday. Suddenly, our iMac refused to connect the Internet. Checking on the Network Status, the light was yellow as opposed to green. (See Screenshot 01.) Instead of 192.168.0.10, the local IP address was shown as 169.254.220.4, according to the Network preference pane (See Screenshot 02.), which could be traced to a private layer through nLayer Communications, an Internet service provider in Illinois, USA. Hmm, bizarre… I could manually enter the local IP address. In fact, the the color of the network status turned into green by doing so except that iMac continued to refuse to connect the Internet.  Continue reading →