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Adding a cheap SSD to my 2008 Mac Pro

Windows 10 on my 2008 Mac Pro maxes out the disk i/o while booting, checking for updates and doing whatever it does after startup, plus add Steam and Origin to launch at boot and disk i/o sits at 100% for several minutes after boot. My Windows 10 disk up until now has been a cheap Hitachi/HGST 7200rpm 500GB HDD.

I boot Windows 10 on my Mac Pro only for occasional gaming, so I haven’t been overly eager to install an SSD. It wasn’t until these recent SSD deals with 480GB for as low as $65 that I decided to pick one up.

I’m aware that the 2008 Mac Pro only has a SATA2 disk controller by default so won’t be able to take advantage of the maximum SATA3 SSD speeds (max 600MB/s), but even at SATA2 bandwidth (max 300MB/s) the i/o will still be multiple times faster than what’s capable by a 7200rpm magnetic disk.

For the last couple of magnetic 2.5″ disks I added, I used a cheap $5 2.5 to 3.5″ 3d printed bracket from Amazon. While it works and holds the disks in place, it’s not sturdy enough to get the drives inserted into the SATA slots when you push the drive sled into the machine. You need to reach under to find the back of the drive and give it a push, then it seats into the slot. I decided to try a Sabrent metal bracket for the SSD. When it arrived I realized I had already used one of these in the past when installing an SSD into a 2012 MacBook Pro. These are pretty sturdy and work well:

$5 3d printed adapter on left, Sabrent adapter on right

A few notes as reminders to myself on the install:

  • Windows 10 will not install from the ISO burnt to a USB flash drive, no matter whether you set it up from Windows 10, MacOS, or Linux. I tried multiple times, and it will not boot. Strangely, MacOS will boot and install from a USB flash drive just fine.
  • Windows 10 will not install to a fresh, blank HD or SSD if there are other disks already in the Mac Pro. Remove all the other disks, leaving just the target disk for Windows 10. Boot from DVD, complete the install, then insert all the other disks back after completing the install
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My HDDs with most uptime hours

I keep a few old HDDs around as scratch disks for installing random stuff. I realized a couple of them I’ve been using fairly regularly in my Mac Pro are pretty old, so took at look at the SMART stats (smartctl) to see how old they actually are, and what their stats and uptime actually are:

WD Caviar Blue 500GB – this drive came installed in my 2008 Mac Pro when I bought it used. I’ve no idea if it was an original disk in the machine or added later, but it’s still chugging along with no errors and over 3.7 years uptime:

32,830 uptime hours
0 read error rate
SMART health: PASSED

Hitachi Deskstar 3.5″ 7200rpm P7K500 250GB – I have 2 of these disks that I used in a Linux server as a RAID1 pair when I used to self host my website from home. Still no errors and over 5 years uptime so far:  

45,082 uptime hours
0 read error rate
SMART health: PASSED

I understand that both of these are on borrowed time and I don’t use these for anything critical, but it’s interesting to see how long some disks last. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve also had several disks fail within a year, and one (a Quantum Fireball I think) failed within a couple of weeks, but it’s interesting to compare the lifetimes and failures from a number of disks over time.

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Learning Golang (part 1)

A few random notes from my initial attempts learning Golang.

Compile and run:

go run source.go

Build executable:

go build source.go

Structure:

//defines a module
package packagename

Package main defines a standalone executable:

package main

Import required packages:

import packagename

Semicolons are not required unless there’s more than one statement on a line

Functions:

func functionName() {
  //code
{

Arguments passed to an app are accessible via the array os.Args. os.Args[0] contains the name of the app itself.

Ok, let’s try my first hello world in Eclipse with the Goclipse plugin installed:

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main(){
    fmt.Println("hello!")
}

I get this error:

Ok, first lesson, a package is required, so added:

package main

Creating a Run As… config in Eclipse for my project and then attempting to Run again gave me this useful message:

Ok, so I moved my source into an app folder (/src/main) but this gave me additional errors. At this point I’ve errors about $GOPATH:

Looking through the Project properties, this dialog with this option adds the Project location into the required GOPATH:

Now my first app runs successfully!

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Observations about common IT technologies in 1988-89

Sometime around 1988-1989 I did some part-time data entry work for an IT Recruitment Agency that my Dad worked for. Tucked away in some papers I found these two sheets listing a range of different programming languages and other in-demand software packages/systems at the time. From memory, I think this list was what I used to code each of the job applicants tech skills as they were entered into their recruitment CV/resume database.

List of programming languages and related products tracked as CV skills used by a recruitment agency, around 1988-1989

There’s many things interesting about this list from 30 years ago. The first that caught my attention is how many of the tech skills on this list are no longer in use today, and some I’ve never even heard of since.

The second point that’s interesting is how many technologies and languages we commonly use today are not even on this list, meaning they were developed and introduced at some point after 1989. Every web technology in common use today was introduced after this point – HTML, CSS, JavaScript and any of the various popular JavaScript libraries, all introduced at some point after 1989.

Even other popular languages and frameworks/platforms, Visual Basic, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP … all introduced after 1989.

This reinforces the fact that commonly used IT technologies come and go pretty quick, and what’s common today can easily be replaced with something else tomorrow. If you’re planning to stay in IT for the long run (longer than a few years), be prepared to keep your skills up to date, stay flexible and adapt to change.

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