17Aug 2020 by Tom Southerland No Comments

Roll Your Own Thunderbolt 3 External SSD

Mac, Technology, Virtualization
I recently received a 13" MacBook Pro with an internal 512GB SSD. I support a lot of different products and need to virtualize many different environments to do so. Naturally, 512GB fills up pretty fast when creating a bunch of virtual machines so I started shopping for decent external SSDs. It seems silly to waste my money on SSDs based on USB 3.x interfaces as they generally top out between 500MB/s to 1050MB/s when we now have Thunderbolt 3 which is 4 times faster at 40Gbps. The Sticker shock of these new TB3 SSDs is a bit much as at the time I'm writing this, the Samsung X5 2TB SSD is a whopping $699.99. I just couldn't justify this purchase and started doing a bit of research. Turns out you…
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22Apr 2014 by Tom Southerland 3 Comments

Using ZFS in OS X

Mac, Technology
I recently decided to try out the OpenZFS implementation of ZFS on my mac desktop and so far, I'm impressed. In this post, I'll cover some of the issues encountered along the way. Let me start by describing my configuration. My desktop is a hack(intosh) with Mavericks installed on two internal 1TB drives. The primary boot drive is partitioned into one big slice and I use CarbonCopy to clone this disk to the second disk. My goal is to migrate my home directories, /Users, to a ZFS mirror and keep OSX on it's own partition. This is pretty simple with two disks but I thought I would cover the steps here and hopefully help others down the ZFS path. (more…)
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22Apr 2014 by Tom Southerland No Comments

Burn ISO Image

Mac, Technology
My desktop system is a Mac and I use VMware Fusion to test operating systems and cluster configurations.  Oracle sometimes delivers the Oracle Solaris Cluster software in a tarball so here's how to burn it to an ISO image which can then be mounted inside the virtual machine: hdiutil makehybrid -iso -udf -joliet -o solaris-cluster-3_3u1-ga-x86.iso solaris-cluster-3_3u1-ga-x86
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