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Snow Leopard (part 1)
By joe | September 6, 2009
When most people ask me about my experience with Snow Leopard so far, I’m forced to say, not much. There’s not much to notice, which is probably why Apple wisely opted for the bargain price of $29 for their latest operating system, Snow Leopard. This is version 10.6 of the OS X (10) operating system foundation. It was intended mostly as a performance upgrade, updating code to a version more able to exploit the power of today’s multiple processor, 64 bit computers, which also come with more RAM than I had storage in my first computer (1 GB, by the way, along with 1GB Jaz cartridges).
Getting ready to start the installation
Snow Leopard also has some cosmetic changes and big upgrade for QuickTime Player. If you consider that it typically cost $25 for the QuickTime Pro version previously, than, for four more dollars, you get a faster computer and 6GB free disk space. Overall, I’d say if you want to stay current, get the upgrade, you’ll hardly notice it, and it is worth the cost of the upgrade for the overall benefits. However, I wouldn’t rush to upgrade as I did.
Rush may not be the best of terms here. Although I probably did it quicker than you (presuming that’s why you’re reading this), I didn’t quite rush through it. Just before the arrival of Snow Leopard, my OWC Mercury Elite Pro (which I won’t link here, since I do not recommend it -- another story), decided to crap out on me. That wiped out a year and a half of Time Machine backups. My shipment of Snow Leopard was also being held for me at the local FedEx facility. Apple decided that they needed my signature for their $29 shipment. I received, coincidentally, that OWC drive, which cost me at the time over $600, on my porch, sans signature. My frustration here is because by the time I found out that a signature was required, I was already on my way on a business trip to Philadelphia. Nobody was home to sign for the delivery, so I had to drag myself into the FedEx facility nearby. I know, what a hardship.
As it turns out, I needed to pick up a new drive anyway. Since my OWC drive failed me miserably (have I mentioned how disappointed I was in this drive?). I dropped by my local Best Buy, and found a decent deal , at $109 for a Western Digital My Book, 1TB, Mac Edition (which just means it comes pre-formated for Macs, same physical drive as for PCs). This drive only has a USB interface, but for what I needed (backups) it suited me just fine. Using my trusty disk replication tool, Carbon Copy Cloner, I started to create a replica of my system drive in my Mac Pro. This was on Saturday at 1PM. Fourteen and a half hours later, the replica was complete.
Replacement Backup Drive
As a side note, I just wanted to mention how quiet this Western Digital My Book is. That OWC junk was noisy! Don’t believe the hype on their site -- it was louder than my Mac, even with the original video card. The time it took to copy my drive was a bit long, but I also have 650GB of data on that drive.
Even though it took me a while, and I was anxious to get some weekend time with my new ‘toy’, I waited out the backup. You should never fly without a net in these cases. An accidental reformat, or unexpected outcome from an upgrade can leave you file-less -- all your data gone. Since Time Machine, I’ve become dependent on it for all my backups. With storage so inexpensive, I don’t archive much to optical (CD/DVD) disks much these days. I also have a lot of large video files, many of which couldn’t fit on optical media (such as HD video clips transferred from my video camera). So, I had nothing much to fall back on, should this upgrade fail miserably. I trust Apple, but I don’t trust anyone that much.
After the backup, the install was a breeze. From when I launched the setup to when the welcome video was available, it was about 32 minutes. It started out indicating that it would be 45 minutes, but it proceeded much faster for me. I also have a hardware RAID card, with a stripped disk set -- which is more than say your iMac or MacBook (Pro) models would have. As with many others, I, too, saw a ~6GB free disk space gift post installation.
Besides the welcome video, there was little immediately apparent to me after the installation completed. In some sense, that was good. All my settings right where I left them; desktop icons exactly where they were previously, including background images; and no long update of each hardware peripheral (mouse, printer, camera, etc) as the new operating system has to recognize each one, as it typically would with a Windows upgrade.
My installation is now a week old. I haven’t noticed much in the way of major problems. There have been a couple of times I have noticed when I sat down at my computer in the morning, the displays were blank/dark, but not in sleep mode. I know they were in sleep mode the night before. I also noticed that I had to download and install (without reboot) Rosetta after all -- Quicken for Mac 2007 required it. This all happened automatically. Performance is a bit improved, but I can’t say that I could quantify the amount of improvement. My Mac Pro is already pretty fast, even being two years old now. Your results may vary on different models.
My next test may have different results. Since I don’t have the space on my temporary backup drive to make another copy, I will have to wait for the new storage. I ordered a new Drobo to take over for my Time Machine backups. That way, if a physical drive fails, it won’t take my backups with it. OWC wanted me to find appropriate packaging and pay to ship their failed drive back to them for warranty repair. I figured that I would save the money, and put it towards something more resilient to hardware failures.
Once the new Drobo arrives, I’ll make another copy and then attempt a fresh install. Since several of my other software titles have been updated over the last several months (Final Cut Studio, iWork, iLife) and I have some lingering trial software, I figured I would do a clean install once Snow Leopard arrived. That will be part two of my Snow Leopard post.
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