Burp Suite

“I have to tell you the amount of information you provide on your website is mind blowing and incredibly useful. You make building RAID arrays, choosing hard drives, and maximizing Photoshop something that seems very achievable to those that are not so tech savvy. I am a techie but never really got why you set up RAID's until I started reading your work” — James M

“Your online articles are absolutely terrific—how you do all that is amazing. They are a big help for me.” — Peter M

“I am just about to purchase a Mac Pro... being a designer and video editor I would ideally like to get the 8 core, so my first question...” — Nige D

1. Choose the right Mac the first time.

2. Save money buying the right stuff.

3. Configure it for high performance, reliability and data safety.

4. Optimize your software and workflow.

The Mac Pro is our #1 consulting request. We can save you many hours of research and frustration. Take advantage of custom consulting for you to get your system just right for your needs.

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Table of Contents

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Updated!

Upgrade now or wait?

1. Introduction Updated!
2. How to Safely Install Snow Leopard Updated!
3. Performance New!
4. Memory and Drives for Snow Leopard Updated!
5. Booting into 64-bit mode Updated!
6. Hardware Compatibility Updated!
7. Software Compatibility Updated!
8. Printing with Epson Pro Printers Updated!
9. Hassles and Bugs Updated!
10. Test Notes New!

Choosing and Configuring a Mac Updated!

An in-depth buyer’s guide for outfitting a Macintosh for top performance.

1. How to Choose a Mac
2. How to Select and Configure a Mac Pro
3. How to Select and Configure a MacBook Pro
4. How to Select and Configure an iMac
5. Buying a Refurbished Mac
6. Buying a Mac at the Apple Store
7. Upgrading Your Mac
8. Setting up Your New Mac (or renovating one)
9. Boot Drive Dogma
10. Backup and reliability
11. Simple and cost-effective backups
12. Backing up with Apple’s Mac Backup New!
13. My Mac Pro: An Example
14. Mac Pro Memory: choosing, installing, testing

How To Guides Updated!

How to perform useful tasks and upgrades.

1. How to boot off an external drive New!
2. How to upgrade your system/boot drive
3. How to clone a volume
4. How to test memory for reliability
5. How to install 6GB of memory in MacBook Pro

Mac Performance 101: Cores, Processes, Memory Updated!

Learn about Activity Monitor and understand how CPU cores, processes, memory use, and software scalability affect performance.

1. Introduction
2. Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance Updated!
3. Observing system performance with Activity Monitor
4. CPU Cores Explained
5. Application support for multiple CPU cores
6. Scalability — multi-core performance
7. Optimizing Developer builds

Mac Performance 102: Storage

Learn about hard drive and interface performance, including RAID, partitioning, eSATA, Firewire, and more.

1. Introduction
2. Why you need more space than you need
3. Why you should avoid Port Multiplication
4. SATA, Firewire, and USB
5. eSATA compared to Firewire 800
6. How to Partition Hard Drives
7. RAID striping and mirroring
8. SoftRAID — easier RAID
9. eSATA PCI-Express card configuration

Recommended

Recommended hardware and software.

1. Recommended External Drive Enclosures
2. Recommended Equipment for Mac Pro
3. Recommended Equipment for MacBook Pro
4. Recommended Vendor OWC

Laptop Hard Drives Tested

Technical performance data.

1. Introduction
2. Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500GB
3. Fujitsu 320GB
4. Intel 80GB X25-M SSD
5. Hitachi 500GB Travelstar 5K500.B
6. Hitachi 320GB Travelstar 7K320
7. Seagate 160GB Momentus 7200.2
8. Seagate 320GB Momentus 7200.3
9. Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black
10. Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue

ESPECIALLY FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS

Optimizing Photoshop Performance Updated!

How to configure a Macintosh to maximize Photoshop CS3/CS4 performance.

1. Introduction
2. How to configure Photoshop for best performance
3. Performance in CS4 vs CS3
4. Test results for Mac Pro Updated!
5. Test results for MacBook Pro
6. MacBook Pro Photoshop speed demon SSD New!
7. Using a RAM disk as a Photoshop scratch disk
8. Benchmark actions
9. Photoshop tips
10. Photoshop oddities
11. Conclusions and Recommendations

Optimizing Other Photography Software

Speedups for working with images.

1. Optimizing Adobe Lightroom
2. Optimizing Canon’s Digital Photo Professional

Mac Pro Nehalem

Configuring and optimizing.

1. Introduction
2. Memory Overview
3. Scalability
4. When More is Less — Dual vs Single CPU
5. Tests — Introduction
6. Tests — Memory and Compute Speed
7. Tests — Photoshop CS4
8. Tests — RAW-file Converters
9. Tests — Scaling/stacking Images
10. Tests — Software Development
11. Conclusions

Solid State Drives (SSD) Updated!

Choosing and using solid state drives.

1. Overview of Solid State Drives (SSD) New!
2. How to Make Your Mac Feel Lighting-fast
3. Installing a solid state drive (SSD)
4. Reconditioning a solid state drive (SSD) Updated!
5. Crucial 128GB solid state drive (SSD) New!
6. Crucial M225 256GB solid state drive (SSD) New!
7. OWC Mercury Elite On-The-Go External SSD New!
8. Intel X25-E SSD
9. Intel X25-M SSD on MacBook Pro
10. Intel X25-M SSD in Mac Pro RAID

Reviews Updated!

Ad hoc reviews of hardware and software.

1. Low-power 2TB hard drives New!
2. NewerTech Voyager Q Drive Dock
3. OWC On-The-Go 2.5-inch enclosure
4. Sonnet Fusion F2 portable 2-drive RAID
5. 2009 Apple MacBook Pro unibody 17
6. Pimp My MacBook Pro
7. 2008 Apple MacBook Pro unibody
8. 2009 Apple MacMini
9. Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34

Software Tools

Tools for testing reliability and performance.

1. DiskTester - drive performance and reliability
2. DiglloydTools - Memory and stress testing

Desktop Hard Drives Tested

Technical performance data.

1. Introduction
2. Hitachi 1TB Deskstar E7K1000 Saturn.E
3. Hitachi 1TB Deskstar 7K1000
4. Maxtor 500GB Maxline Pro 7H500F0
5. Seagate 1TB Barracuda ES_2
6. Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11
7. Western Digital 1TB RE3

Trials and Tribulations Updated!

Headaches and hassles.

1. Headaches and hassles Updated!
2. Font Smoothing — Good, bad, or just plain ugly