APS 1300VA UPS Battery Backup System

After purchasing the Apple Mac Pro for the past month, and loving it so much. I've been spending sleepless nights (ok, I'm kidding... in reality, I have an "off" switch on the back of my head. When it hits the pillow, I'm out) thinking about in the event of a bad electric spike, it can seriously damage my baby. Not to mention, if I run into a blackout during upcoming Summer months, I can lose my files to data corruption, and lose my work which I may have worked on for many hours.

The solution is to get a UPS (Interruptible Power Supply) made by APC. Belkin makes several reputable model as well. However, I'm old school with APC from the years of working as a network administrator which we employ APC UPS to power backup network servers.

Circuit City had a great deal this weekend with the APC 1300 VA Battery Backup System with LCD Display. The voltage capacity is very important when considering a UPS because depending on the number of device, computer, monitor and peripherals such as external hard drives and external DVD burners, it might be too much of a strain on a more anemic version. 1300 volts protection is just about right because it's affordable yet it can protect all the devices I mention above. It's rated up to 136 minutes of power backup which is ample time for me to save my files and turn off my computer, or enough time for power to recover. Plus, it conditions electric current coming out of the wall to my computer power supply and avoid too high of a spike which can permanently damage my baby. This model has a LCD display which show the status of the electric current and the load it's taking on. As a curiosity, I noticed that the electric current fluctuates from 119 volts to 122 volts throughout the day. It has 8 outlets. 6 of which is battery backup for devices such as monitors, computer, external hard drives. And 2 outlets not backup for devices such as printers, speakers, DVD burners, etc.

Now with APC 1300 VA running 24/7... I can now sleep soundly. ;-)

Bought it at Circuit City $129.95 - $15.00 Coupon discount = $125.00

Just a quick update on 12/9, Circuit City is selling it for $119. I guess I'll make a quick stop to CC and get my $10 + Tax back since it's within 30 days price match period.

Mac Pro & Leopard Review

After using the Mac Pro and Leopard for the past 30 days, I must say that it's one of the best investment (the other would be Wacom Cintiq 21ux) to date in terms of speeding up post production workflow in Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Lightroom.

It's probably due to the fact that Photoshop CS3 now runs natively in Intel Mac processors and partly because the Mac Pro just kick-butt in terms of speed. The Quad-Core Xeon processor just churns out processes effortlessly. I have 5GB of RAM (read my previous blog on how easy it is to install memory) and that just made life so fast and easy. Someday, I'll max it out to 16GB, (yes 16GB!!) but for now since I'm not doing intensive video editing, 5 GB is more than enough.The Mac Pro came with a 250GB hard drive but it has 3 more hard drive cage. So I added 3 more 500GB SATA hard drives. I "raided" 2 of the 3 hard drives to mirror each other. (Please view my previous posts on how to install hard drives and Raid it 1 for mirroring.) This way if one of the drives fail, I have a back up drive of my most important files such as digital images and videos. The other 500 GB hard drive I store my personal files and personal digital images. With Leopard's Time Machine, I have an external hard drive backing up those files. What's the difference you ask? RAID 1 drives are quicker to reconstruct and restore files than Time Machine.
Finally, Leopard is an awesome OS. It makes Windows Vista looks like DOS. Vista is just too sluggish and a memory hog. Leopard just files through everything I do with my computer. I particularly like Spaces. Spaces is a new feature in Leopard where you can separate your desktop into 4, 8, 12 sections. I usually group one space for surfing the web and emails, another for Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, and third to copy files, install applications, and a 4th for whatever else that I don't want to clutter up my workspace. I don't even need to use Expose anymore.The only drawback is that Leopard is not compatible with some of my software such as Parallels, CS3 premium to name a few. I heard a new update is on the way by the middle of December.

All in all, I'm just tinkle pink with my new Mac Pro. I'm now working 3x the speed of my Macbook Pro which means I have now more time to do other things such as blogging. :-)

RAID 1 of My New Hard Drives

After installing my 3 new 500GB hard drives, I decided to RAID two of those drives to RAID 1 which is mirroring. Should one of these 2 hard drives fail, the hard drive will act as a backup and rebuild the replacement hard drive. I use OSX's disk utility to create the RAID set.

RAID 1 basically makes 2 hard drives as if it is one drive. When you save or write to one drive, it will automatically save or write an identical file to the other drive hence the concept of mirroring your drives. The only drawback is that you lose half of your storage space. In my case, I have 2 500GB drives which would make it 1 Terabyte of disk space. By mirroring, I reduced it by half and only have 500GB of storage. It's a drawback but I'm willing to live with it because I would much rather have data redundancy and not have to risk any of my data. I can't afford to lose my clients' wedding images because they are priceless. I can't ask them to reinvite all their friends and families, and dress up in a tux and gown again.

So now-a-days, I sleep much better knowing my data is secure. Next week, I will take one step further and employ Leopard OS's Time Machine. Stay tune... more to come next week...

Installing Hard Drives to My New Mac Pro

The new Mac Pro internal configuration is magnificent. Simply genius as it's so clean and tidy, totally cable free. The memory, optical drives, and hard drives are all snapped in with it's own installation cage.

The 4 hard drives bay slide out easily and cleanly for quick hard drive installation. You'll notice in the video below, it's relatively simple without changing jumpers, nor have to indicate master vs. slave drives. All I needed was one small screw drivers. In fact, the screws were pre-fabricated with the hard drive cage. All I need to do is screw on the hard drive to have secure mounting of the hard drive. I now have 1.75 Terabytes worth of disk space.

Tune in next week as I'm going to attempt to install an external hard drive and test out Leopard's Time Machine. The external drive must be at lease the same size or larger in order for Time Machine to work. I'm also going to try to replace the original 250GB hard drive in the Mac Pro. I purchased a SATA hard drive enclosure at the LA Computer Show today. My plan is to remove the 250GB hard drive which contains MAC OS Leopard which I will copy to another 500 GB SATA hard drive. Come back next week and read more.