Time Machine is an excellent feature, its done in true Apple style, simple yet powerful, but there is one downfall to Time Machine, and thats the hardware it requires. Like most people, I use an external drive for Time Machine, the Porsche designed LaCie 500Gb USB drive.

My problem with the Porsche designed LaCie drive is its noise. This drive has a fan that kicks in after the drive’s been on for a while, it’ll turn off after it’s cooled down, but its annoying either way. I’ve been reluctant to to pull the drive apart because there are no visible screws or access points.

For those wondering, the Porsche designed LaCie 500Gb USB external drive has a 7200 RPM 3Gb/s SATA drive with 16Mb of cache (here’s a link to the drive on newegg).

Originally, I was just going to disconnect the fan inside the drive, but once I saw it had a SATA drive I decided to move the drive inside my Mac Pro. If that’s what you want to do, here’s the instructions to do so.

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Before Apple released Leopard, I wanted to speedup my MacBook Pro, which came standard with a 5400 RPM SATA laptop drive. It’s (at the time I purchased it) a stock MacBook Pro, with the Intel 2.33 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 Gb of RAM and of course the 5400 RPM SATA drive.

The MacBook Pro has the capability of being a kick ass laptop, after all its the fastest windows laptop sold. To get desktop performance out of my MacBook Pro I decided to upgrade the hard drive to a 200 Gb 7200 PRM SATA Hitachi 2.5 inch drive, one which I purchased from Newegg.

The upgrade was easy, the only problem I ran into was the cable for the touch pad and the strip of tape holding it to the drive covered the new drive’s breathing hole. Once installed, I reinstalled Tiger (remember, before Leopard was released).

My results from Xbench are listed below, I tested each drive four times.

5400 RPM stock Apple drive:

• Drive test average: 29.66 (best: 35.29, worst: 14.57)
• Total score average: 97.79 (best: 110.03, worst: 66.27)

7200 RPM Hitachi drive (replacement):

• Drive test average: 41.74 (best: 43.07, worst: 39.97)
• Total score average: 116.62 (best: 118.68, worst: 112.55)

Without the drive test, my MacBook Pro receives a score of 166.18, so you can see how the drive test can drag the score down.

Just for something to compare this 7200 RPM 2.5 inch drive to, the standard 250Gb 7200 RPM SATA drive that came stock in my Mac Pro benchmarks at 51.02 (disk test only), although, with a Western Digital Raptor RAID array (two 36 Gb 10,000 RPM SATA “Raptor” drives in RAID 0 (32k blocks)) gets a score of 114.24 (disk test only).

The 2.5 inch 200 Gb Hitachi 7200 RPM drive that I put into the MacBook Pro gives near desktop performance, and makes a noticeable difference in day to day use, applications launch quicker and OS X feels quicker overall. 7200 RPM drives are the standard for desktops, and should be the same for laptops.

For those wondering which drive I used, here’s a link to it Hitachi 200 Gb 7200 RPM 2.5 inch SATA hard drive.

I’ve been a big fan of the Battlefield series since BF1942, and one thing I was disappointed about when I switched to the mac was the lack of games. So when Battlefield 2142 came out for the Mac I got it, but I was expecting my MacBook Pro to play Battlefield 2142 a little better than it did. BF2142 would lag so bad it was not playable, primarily when lots of stuff was going on, or when I needed to shoot at something. I started looking for a fix (and the cause) and just today came across (while browsing through BF2142’s files) that BF2142 keeps a cache of effects stored in your home folder under (Your Short Name)/Library/Preferences/Battlefield 2142 Preferences/p_drive/My Documents. I then put two and two together and figured FileVault (OS X’s home folder encryption) was causing the game to lag. So I turned off FileVault and launched the game once that was finished, it runs a lot smoother now with FileVault off. Sense Battlefield 2142 for the Mac isn’t native (its actually emulating the Windows .EXE’s) I wasn’t expecting performance to be that good, but how it played with FileVault enabled was unacceptable.

So if your installation of Battlefield 2142 is lagging try this:

1. If you’ve got FileVault enabled, disable it.
2. BF2142 uses around 1Gb of RAM, make sure you’ve got that much or more.
3. I suspect the speed of the hard drive has a lot to do with this, get the fastest drive possible, like a 7200RPM drive (my MacBook Pro came with a 5400RPM drive).