Snow Leopard: Easy on the Hard Drive

by David on June 10, 2009

Snow Leopard Refined

This week Apple, Inc. announced many enhancements and refinements to Mac OS X, dubbing the latest version “Snow Leopard.” And with it come some pretty cool refinements to hard drive usage, storage, backup and energy savings. Backups through Time Machine, Mac OS X’s built-in backup solution (which came with Leopard), have been improved by 50% (measured by the amount of time it takes to incrementally update a backup of your system). The total amount of data storage space required to run the operating system has been reduced by 6GB, freeing up space for your personal use. Improvements have also been made to the external drive eject action. Greater reliability and help when things do go wrong have been added.

Other improvements include better use of energy for systems that share files with other computers and devices on your network. With the right combination of hardware, your computer will wake up when files are needed and go back to sleep until other files are needed. Improvements to file access in Boot Camp allow access to Mac OS X files while working in the Windows partition. And to top it all off, key system files have been rewritten in 64-bit format, which brings speed and improved security to the operating system.

For a complete view of what Apple is saying about the technology improvements, please see Apple’s New Technology page for Snow Leopard.

Here are some of the storage-related details.

Time Machine in Half the Time

quicker-time-machineFirst, Apple is predicting a 50% reduction in the time it takes to backup your hard drive with Time Machine. Also reduced is the time it will take to make that initial backup to Time Capsule.

Time Machine is great for many users who take the “set it and forget it” approach to system backups. And this works for me as a part of my backup strategy. I like the fact that the backup is removed by some distance from my computer (it is in another room of the house, well separated from my computer).

The only complaint that I have had about Time Machine is the time that it takes to get a backup done. Since one of my computers is the MacBook Air, the entire backup process takes place over a wireless connection. Once the initial backup was done, Time Machine works pretty quickly, but I usually see backups in the range of 2 to 3 GB on a regular basis. The reduction of backup time is a welcome improvement for Snow Leopard!

Free Storage — Get Back 6GB

snow-leopard-footprintSecond, Snow Leopard saves storage. It promises to take up less than half of the disk space of Leopard, freeing up about 6GB of space on your hard drive. Your data storage just increased by 6GB, which Apple says is enough for about 1,500 more songs or a few thousand more photos. On the MacBook Air, every gigabyte is precious, so an extra 6GB can really be exactly what you need as you travel with this slick laptop. It might save you from the necessity of carrying around an external hard drive.

This also suggests that considerable software refinement has been done at the system level. This should, in theory, be good news for everything from startup to shutdown. And in fact, one of the improvements that Apple has announced with Snow Leopard is just that–quicker system wake-up and shutdown.

Reliable Disk Ejecting

external-hard-drive-ejectThe next storage-related improvement involves the reliability of ejecting discs and external hard drives. Sometimes an application or process will prevent you from ejecting a drive because it is using the files on it. You may not know the reason that Mac OS X is preventing you to eject it. Snow Leopard promises fewer of those errors and more information about which application is using the external drive, giving you a chance to exit the correct application and get your drive to eject properly.

You will get the chance to see which application is hanging up the drive and quit that application gracefully, telling the file system that you are done with the files and the drive can be ejected. This will help in those situations where a process or applications refuses the give access to the drive back to the system.

Share Files and Go Back to Sleep

snow-leopard-sharingAnother refinement involves file sharing from your hard drive. If you are sharing files using the Bonjour technology, you know how easy it is to share media and files over your network. The technology for easy sharing is built right in to Mac OS X. Snow Leopard will make it easy to share these files without leaving your computer awake all the time. Your computer will be able to go to sleep and with a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time Capsule base station, it will be able to continue sharing its files with other computers (or other devices such as Apple TV), waking only when you need it and sleeping when you don’t.

Boot Camp Users Rejoice

For Boot Camp users, HFS+ read support allows you to access files on your Mac OS X partition from within Windows. Read-only status prevents PC viruses from affecting mac OS X, but you can always save your work in the Windows partition and later access them safely from the Mac OS X side.

64-bit From Top to Bottom

Much of Mac OS X is already 64-bit capable, but Snow Leopard saw a rewrite of all key system applications in 64-bit code. Your Mac will now be able to address a huge memory space (16 terabytes of RAM). Okay, so today that’s a lot of RAM, but in the future–who knows? (I remember when 640K was considered to be more than enough). Apple is calling it faster and more secure.

Release Date: September 2009

There are many more refinements coming with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. We can’t wait to get our hands on this update. Check out all the refinements on Apple’s site for details. It is scheduled for release in September, 2009.

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