With the help of CCC on my 13" 2011 MBP, I backed up the contents of a 12 year old external USB/FireWire/eSATA HDD to a USB 3.0 HDD unit. Given the age of the drive and the random nature of sudden death syndrome with HDDs, it had plagued my mind for a while that I needed to take sensible precautions because the data would be irreplaceable.
I'd attempted to do this previously through standard copy & paste in Finder but the operation quit with an error. Just to be on the safe side, at some point in the very near future I will carry out a further back up to an additional drive. The process took a whopping nine hours and fourteen minutes for 1TB of data. I think that USB 2.0 ports and the NTFS file system might've contributed to this. Whilst I do have a Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 dongle, I cannot use it without disconnecting my HDTV.
The process took a whopping nine hours and fourteen minutes for 1TB of data. I think that USB 2.0 ports and the NTFS file system might've contributed to this.
As a winter weekend project, I wanted to try something with the cooling situation on my A1261 MacBook Pro.
It’s not really a secret how the aluminium MBPs have the tendency to run pretty hot at even the best of times. But I got kind of tired dealing with a really hot lap after using it for awhile — even to the point where it was slowly scalding my thigh.
This MBP was the one I only started using last year after sourcing a green-dot board for it. As with all my Macs, I use Noctua NT-H2 paste, which is consistently pretty good at doing what it’s supposed to do. Even so, the MBP was still warm to hot in very localized spots directly beneath the heat sink bridge, particularly on the left side (or, the side nearest the Magsafe adapter). I’m guessing a far-infrared camera would have shown three localized hot spots where the CPU, GPU, and memory controller are located.
So I thought about the underside of the heat sink bridge and took stock of how there are only small portions of the bridge which actually make direct contact with the bottom case. Since the bridge, as designed, can shunt only so much heat to the fans, there aren’t other ways for heat conduction and dissipation to take place.
Except, well, perhaps there might be!
Borrowing from user discussions on improving heat dispersion in current-gen Silicon MacBook Airs, I bought a 10x10cm sheet of 1mm-thick silicone thermal pad. I went ahead and cut out pieces of the thermal pad to fit the underside areas of the heat sink bridge (which otherwise don’t make contact with anything, aside from poorly circulated air) to help to move some of the heat generated to the aluminium case, rather than make the fans do nearly all of the work.
If all worked as planned, the overall temperature of the case would feel warmer (including around the palm rest), but this manner of heat dissipation would also take longer for the fans to rev up as high to move out heat and to “de-localize” the hot spots underneath the laptop. In other words, I’m using the aluminium case more directly to keep “hot spots” from getting so hot so often and to make resting it on my lap more tolerable.
There were a couple of tiny spots I could have filled in, but for sake of testing, I left them alone. I didn’t use thermal pads in the zones next to the fans, as those are sealed by a thin foam rectangle factory-attached to the bottom case (and sealing away air within from the rest of the case). I might come back to those later.
(While I had the heat sink bridge out, I also opened the fan assemblies, cleaned out a year’s worth of dust, and added to the spindles a drop of the lubricant I’ve been using for refurbishing fans.)
I ran a screen cap of the temps before I put the system into hibernate, and about an hour after I woke the system from deep sleep. The ambient room conditions were the same:
I wrote this post with the laptop on my lap, and for a change, it isn’t slow-cooking me. The fans aren’t moving as quick as before, while the top case and overall bottom case are perceptibly warmer. The above data are the best I can do without access to an infrared camera.
tl;dr: Not so hot!
EDIT to UPDATE, late into day 2: Even as this is still pretty early, post-modification, there is still a noteworthy drop in overall temperatures around the areas of heat generation — namely, the CPU/GPU areas and their respective heatsinks. In the 7-day line chart on iStat Menus, the drop in overall temperatures at the typically hottest area — the GPU heatsink — is evident (the break in the line is when the system was in hibernate mode and while I was adding in the thermal pad modification).
Overall, the CPU die is about 12°C cooler; the CPU proximity is about 6.5°C cooler, and the GPU Heatsink(0) is about 7°C cooler; other generators of heat are between 6 and 7°C cooler. Meanwhile, the three heatpipe sensors are about 2–5°C cooler, and the two case-related thermal sensors — Palm Rest and Skin Proximity — are 6°C and 4°C cooler, respectively (i.e., not as much of a drop as at the areas where that heat is generated). What this suggests is the aluminium case is now taking on (and dissipating passively) more of the overall heat from the thermal generation, borne out by an overall warmer case, and lacking the localized scalding-hot spots.
Put another way: the difference between the GPU Heatsink(0) and Skin Proximity before the thermal pad modification was about 28°C; since the modification, the difference is about 25°C — or about 3°C (which is bang-on with the difference between the 7°C cooler GPU Heatsink(0) and the 4°C cooler Skin Proximity reading). In Fahrenheit, that’s about 5.5°F.
As I add this section via the A1261, I’ve managed to push the Skin Proximity temp up to 42°C under load (Interweb, Transmission, Console, Preview, and a few OS X lightweight utilities like Dictionary and Calculator). Before the thermal pad mod, this would have been closer to 46°C — the latter being above the threshold for risking second-degree burns (after over an hour of constant exposure) or third-degree burns (after over 90 minutes of constant exposure); in localized spots, such as where the cross-members of the heatpipe assembly met the bottom case), that temp was likely much higher). And this might finally explain how I received such deep burns over the summertime as I used this laptop on my bare leg lap.
Unloved orphan of tl;dr: This thermal pad mod is doing exactly what I hoped it would (better cooling, less hot to the touch, and hopefully extending life on the GPU and CPU with less heat lingering) — all for less than $10!
If Aliexpress sellers/vendors deliver to the UK, then you should have no trouble finding some of that thermal pad stuff! Just make sure you get the 1.0mm thickness or even the 1.5mm thickness; the 0.5mm thickness is too thin to fill that height difference of the heatpipe assembly’s cross-members.
Made a nice wallpaper of my IBM ThinkPad 560E (which runs OpenStep pretty nicely) on my late 2013 macbook pro 13" running mavericks thought you might enjoy it so here it is! its a pretty massive photo (tops out at 37mb might be 4k not sure took it with my 6S Plus running iOS 9.3.3)
Why yes it is its from 1997? it has a 166mhz Pentium with MMX technology 32mb of ram and a s3 gpu with 2mb of ram running openstep 4.2 and windows 95 in a separate partition
I just got my newest toy, a 256GB “SSUBX” AHCI PCIe SSD. This is Apple's custom variant of the Samsung SM951 AHCI PCIe SSD. The following image shows the 128GB variant, but the 256GB one looks the same.
So what's the deal with this thing? Aren't NVMe PCIe SSDs newer, better, faster 'n' stuff? Of course they are, but third-party NVMe SSDs require High Sierra to be recognised and a reasonably modern Mac — 2010(?) and newer — to be bootable. AHCI PCIe SSDs, on the other hand, use the universal AHCI driver that is built into Leopard and later versions of OS X, so they can even be used with Leopard, including in PCIe G5s. And they’re bootable in early/earlier Intel Macs as well.
I popped this into a PCIe adapter, stuck the adapter into an AKiTiO Thunder2 PCIe enclosure and hooked it up to my Early 2011 13" MacBook Pro — runinng Snow Leopard — via Thunderbolt 1. Result: a match made in heaven.
It shows up like a regular internal SATA drive would, even getting the “internal drive” icon. Don't let the link speed of 6 Gbps fool you, this baby crashes right through it.
The controller’s vendor ID is Samsung’s as expected. And: Confirming that it uses four PCIe lanes. Thunderbolt 1 is PCIe 1.0 so link speed should™ actually read 2.5 GT/s (5 GT/s is for PCIe 2.0). Correction: Thunderbolt 1 is PCIe 2.0. Thanks @joevt! Enough words though, let's see what this baby can do!
HOLY MOLY! 900 MB/s read, 800 MB/s write. The SSD can actually do even more, but Thunderbolt 1 bottlenecks it. Still, we're pleasantly close to Thunderbolt 1's theoretical maximum of ≈1000 MB/s.
And yes, Snow Leopard boots just fine off it, I've just tested this.
Confirming that it uses four PCIe lanes. Thunderbolt 1 is PCIe 1.0 so link speed should™ actually read 2.5 GT/s (5 GT/s is for PCIe 2.0). Enough words though, let's see what this baby can do!
It says 5.0 GT/s which means Thunderbolt 1 is PCIe 2.0.
I suppose you can test this by taping off all but the first lane to make it x1 which should give ≈450 MB/s for PCIe 2.0 and ≈200 MB/s for PCIe 1.0. Or use a x1 to x16 riser.
Actually, the 900MB/s might be enough to prove PCIe 2.0 since PCIe 1.0 x4 is usually less than ≈900 MB/s? But it's not conclusive since PCIe 1.0 x4 is 1000 MB/s disregarding overhead.
Actually, you can probably switch the Thunderbolt controller downstream bridge to PCIe 1.0 using the fast.sh script and pciutils (but you need DirectHW.kext for old versions of macOS). If it reduces the speed, then you know it was running at PCIe 2.0 speed before that.
I see. I mistakenly assumed that Thunderbolt 1’s 10 Gbps limit implied it was PCIe 1.0, even though Sandy Bridge supports PCIe 2.0. Thanks for the correction.
Actually, you can probably switch the Thunderbolt controller downstream bridge to PCIe 1.0 using the fast.sh script and pciutils (but you need DirectHW.kext for old versions of macOS). If it reduces the speed, then you know it was running at PCIe 2.0 speed before that.
Thunderbolt 1 supports 20 Gbps just like Thunderbolt 2 except that Thunderbolt 2 is able to combine the two 10 Gbps channels into a single 20 Gbps link.
Thunderbolt 1 has two separate 10 Gbps links. It can connect two 8 Gbps displays (1440p60) but it can't connect a 16 Gbps (4K60) display like Thunderbolt 2 can.
PCIe tunnelling is limited to 10 Gbps (a single channel) for Thunderbolt 1. Maybe there's a way to get two separate 10 Gbps PCIe tunnels on the same Thunderbolt cable if the paths are somehow made separate - but the tunnels would be to different devices - not a single NVMe. There's enough PCIDown adapters for that (my iMac14,2 has one Thunderbolt controller, two Thunderbolt ports, and 4 PCIDown adapters). I don't know if that kind of path manipulation is possible. I do know that you can make a DisplayPort path from one domain to another (like Thunderbolt Target Display Mode does) but I haven't looked at how to do the path manipulation (for example, in linux to do Thunderbolt Target Display Mode, or to create a Thunderbolt dock controlled KVM).
Here I'm using VPN software on my 2011 13" MBP to circumvent geo-blocking Internet censorship (in the West.) Originally I took out a two-year subscription after receiving an offer that amounted to paying pennies on a daily basis on the off-chance that I might need this option and its repeatedly proven invaluable over the past 12 months for a variety of situations.
This is not intended to be a political statement - nor do I wish to trigger such a discussion within this forum. I'm just delighted that the VPN software allows me to exercise my right as an adult to access information - which is core to my work as a researcher and decide for myself its merits or the lack of. The Internet was envisioned at one stage as an opportunity to expand our horizons and that ideal has been eroded over time.
This is not intended to be a political statement - nor do I wish to trigger such a discussion within this forum. I'm just delighted that the VPN software allows me to exercise my right as an adult to access information - which is core to my work as a researcher and decide for myself its merits or the lack of. The Internet was envisioned at one stage as an opportunity to expand our horizons and that ideal has been eroded over time.
I miss the Internet of old. Today's Internet does not seem as fun as what it used to be. It's why I spend most of my time in this and the PPC forum along with other vintage computer sites. Current technology has basically become a commodity and utilitarian compared to what it used to be.
Don't get me wrong, there are some benefits to the current Internet but I think it has some serious downsides too.
It certainly does feel that way on occasion. For me, the malaise set in once the corporations sought to commodify and consolidate domination of the Internet just as they have done so with other mediums previously. There was a window where they didn't quite understand what the Net represented but that was short-lived with the fun progressively squeezed in favour of pure profit-chasing.
An stand-out instance of this in recent years was the closure of the Internet Movie Database Forum in 2017. Contrary to what was officially claimed, its parent company Amazon - owned by one of the world's richest people, was unable to find a way to monetise the message boards and so instead it was disbanded.
The amount of web traffic that the members brought to the site and in turn to Amazon, to purchase TV/film content - not to mention the sheer PR goodwill that was afforded by this tremendous resource was lost upon the bean counters at Amazon.
The primary one is the Vintage Computer Federation Forums as they have forums for different kinds (Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM PC, Workstations, Mainframes, etc.)
It certainly does feel that way on occasion. For me, the malaise set in once the corporations sought to commodify and consolidate domination of the Internet just as they have done so with other mediums previously. There was a window where they didn't quite understand what the Net represented but that was short-lived with the fun progressively squeezed in favour of pure profit-chasing.
An stand-out instance of this in recent years was the closure of the Internet Movie Database Forum in 2017. Contrary to what was officially claimed, its parent company Amazon - owned by one of the world's richest people, was unable to find a way to monetise the message boards and so instead it was disbanded.
The amount of web traffic that the members brought to the site and in turn to Amazon, to purchase TV/film content - not to mention the sheer PR goodwill that was afforded by this tremendous resource was lost upon the bean counters at Amazon.
Monetizing activity (and monetizing the activity wrought by that activity): this was the sole contribution a shareholder-oriented, for-profit architecture brought to foisted upon the Internet.
If shareholders could monetize a caracal, an ibex, or a wildebeest leaving a bowel movement, they will find a way to do it. (That’d be one wild micro-transaction!)
Are you, the readers of this hot take, a shareholder? Why not set aside a minute to review your investment portfolio?
Here I'm using VPN software on my 2011 13" MBP to circumvent geo-blocking Internet censorship (in the West.) Originally I took out a two-year subscription after receiving an offer that amounted to paying pennies on a daily basis on the off-chance that I might need this option and its repeatedly proven invaluable over the past 12 months for a variety of situations.
This is not intended to be a political statement - nor do I wish to trigger such a discussion within this forum. I'm just delighted that the VPN software allows me to exercise my right as an adult to access information - which is core to my work as a researcher and decide for myself its merits or the lack of. The Internet was envisioned at one stage as an opportunity to expand our horizons and that ideal has been eroded over time.
I miss the Internet of old. Today's Internet does not seem as fun as what it used to be. It's why I spend most of my time in this and the PPC forum along with other vintage computer sites. Current technology has basically become a commodity and utilitarian compared to what it used to be.
Don't get me wrong, there are some benefits to the current Internet but I think it has some serious downsides too.
Pulled the Black Web BT speaker that the PowerBook G4 was previously using and attached it to the L:09 Mini. With the PowerBook I just plugged the speaker in with a sound cable, it doesn't really like using BT. But the Mini seems to have some sort of issue with that and was making a clicking sound.
So, I pulled the audio cable and connected via BT. No issues doing that with the Mini and the sound is much better than I remember this speaker putting out. I suppose that may be because I've only ever really used it with the PowerBook.
I didn't reply sooner if only because I had to check if there was somehow another IJ movie I'd somehow missed.
And hey, while I loved TLC, I totally get why folks didn't like it compared to Raiders. I mean, my favorite Star Wars original trilogy movie is Return of the Jedi, which is apparently heretical, because no one is supposed to like that movie. Nevertheless, compared to Empire I also get why the fans would have turned their noses up at RotJ.
...and it's not like I really hated Crystal Skull either. It was just puzzlingly non-sensical for me at too many points for it to be enjoyable.
