Mercury Elite Pro
Tired of running out of disk space on my system drive, I ordered an OWC Mercury Elite Pro 800 Dual RAID (man, that’s a mouthful) enclosure. It arrived yesterday via Fedex in a very timely fashion. First impressions? OMG! It’s so cute!
Mine is the 500GB version with twin Hitachi Deskstar 250GB drives in a striped RAID configuration. I plugged it into the back of my RME Fireface’s Firewire 800 connector and the power into my Furman power conditioner. It is now sitting on the floor next to my G5, but may earn a place on my desk behind my monitor. Stupidly, I installed the included Intech Speedtools and attempted a reboot. That should have been my first warning: why do I need a reboot for some drive utilities?
The machine wouldn’t reboot. It froze during shutdown. I ssh’d into the machine from my laptop and checked the system logs. There was some chatter on there, but it mostly seemed to be related to Apache and Tomcat, neither of which were running but were included as part of the shutdown process. Nothing I could do would get the machine to shutdown gracefully so I squeezed the power button and hoped for the best.
Fortunately, it came back up and I looked at the included Speedtools and ran the benchmarks on my new drive, seeing that it could handle sustained 80MB/s transfers as promised then started moving stuff onto it. It was pretty fast.
Unfortunately, Speedtools had made it impossible to mount my iPod. System log tails revealed some complaints about FWOHCI errors and other incomprehensible gunk so I decided it was time to remove the Speedtools. At this point, I challenge you, dear reader, to find anywhere on the web that explains how to do this. Variations on the keywords, “Intech”, “Speedtools”, “Uninstall”, and “get off my fucking computer you piece of shit software” turned up the odd forum post and several of Intech’s support pages, but nowhere did it describe how to safely remove it. Unable to reboot properly, I decided to get out my bowie knife and start slashing.
Searching my system drive through finder for occurrences of filenames with Speedtools and Intech turned up a dozen or so hits in various places. Ultimately, as I suspected from the outset, the real culprit at work was in the kernel extensions folder and wasn’t playing nicely with Tiger’s new kext frameworks. I removed everything I could find and did another forceable reboot. Upon restart, my iPod mounted without any problems.
So, if you’re an OS X Tiger user do not install Intech’s Speedtools. They may have a new version out soon that will address the incompatibilities, but until they play nice and give me an uninstaller, I will be reluctant to try it.
ok, back to the harddrives… Now that I have oodles of space available, I set about reorganizing my system drive. The first step was to get my iTunes folder out of my home directory as it has grown to over 60GB in size and is the main waster of space there. Second was movies and tv shows I had cluttering up my drive. Wtih 90GB suddenly freed up off of my system drive and secondary media drive, it was time to start testing the machine in a thoroughly unscientific yet totally satisfying way: An impromptu guitar jam.
I loaded up iTunes and started some party shuffle (after switching audio outputs to go through the system’s built-in audio). Next, I loaded Logic and my default guitar studio template which opens up an instance of Amplitube for effects. It also has a drum kit and a couple of other instruments for noodling around with in the hopes that some day, a great tune will emerge from this “instant action” empty music file. With iTunes playing off of the media drive, Logic running at an obscene 88.2KHz sampling rate and all of my effects turned up to 11, the performance meters in Logic were barely moving. I was getting nothing off the disk meter and only a blip off of the first CPU meter. Impressive, but I wanted something with heavier disk usage.
I loaded up NIN’s recently-released GarageBand file of “Only” into Logic and started replacing effects with heavier, Logic-optimized plugins. Adding a Space Designer reverb and some extra delays, I started fiddling with knobs during playback. Even with 12 tracks running, and a slew of effects loaded, I could not make the system struggle. All while connected to several channels in AdiumX with my browser running a copy of ogame underneath – something I wouldn’t do if I were actually recording. Which will be my next test sometime this weekend.
Anyway, the Speedtools issue aside, the Mercury Elite Pro Dual RAID is a fantastic storage device. I feel like I’ve gotten a system upgrade. It’s worth mentioning again that this drive is connected out of the back of my audio interface and all of that heavy music effects processing I was running was sitting in the middle of my drive in the chain. I’d say that’s as much a strength of the RME Fireface as it is the drive (not to mention the G5′s firewire bus). With all that on top of the device’s cool looks, it’s a great addition to my machinery.
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