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OWC Envoy

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prod_envoyI ended up inheriting an unwanted/unused 128GB SSD from a Macbook Air, that just sat on my shelf for a year before I decided there had to be something to do with it. A quick search on OWC found the seemingly perfect Envoy enclosure. You just drop in an SSD, and you have a USB3 capable external drive that’s damn fast. Even better, they had one that was open box, and 15% off. Sweet! Ordered and waited.

The enclosure arrived and I quickly installed the SSD. This was pretty painless, but it did seem a bit odd as there was no mechanism to keep the SSD in place… the casing just, basically, sandwiches it. Seems like it would have been preferable to have a some type of set screw, or something to hold things in case of shock… but maybe given how light the SSD is, the chances of it actually pulling free of the connector are minimal. Also a bit annoying is they didn’t provide the torx screwdriver needed to put it together. Thankfully, I had several and it didn’t slow me down.

Once it’s screwed together, they provide some nice rubber feet to place on the bottom that cover the screws, which means taking it apart later would mean pulling those off, but that’n not a huge deal. The drive did come with a nice faux-velvet pouch to keep it in too. Nice!

Plugging it into my new Macbook Air resulted in a pretty quick format, and some fairly impressive speed tests. Uncached sequential reads/writes hovered around the 150MB/sec mark in both 4K and 256K block sizes. Random reads/writes were a bit slower with 4K reads/writes being about 20MB/sec, and 256K reads/writes about 120MB/sec. Which still blows the pants off rotational media. Though all of these are less than I would think an SSD over USB3 would be.

A quick search online turned up that with that generation of the Macbook Air, Apple used either Toshiba or Samsung drives. Where the Samsung’s performed well all over, the Toshiba’s were noticeably slower. But, given the drive was free, I’m not going to complain.

Am I happy? Absolutely. I’d highly recommend this rather inexpensive enclosure, which fits easily in my bag, to anyone with a space MBA SSD lying around. A warning, though, that apparently there are a couple different Envoy models depending on what generation MBA SSD you have. So shop carefully.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

ScanSnap iX500 Software with S1300

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ScansnapMonitorAfter reading a review of the iX500 here, I really wanted to see if the background PDF converter would work with my S1300. Thankfully, Fujitsu seems to have finally allowed downloading of the ScanSnap software without jumping through hoops, and the iX500 version of ScanSnap Manager can be found here.

And indeed, after a quick install, and ignoring the prompts to set up wireless on the iX500, it works! Once that’s done, go into settings, and change your profile is scan to “Searchable PDF Converter”. I would hope Fujitsu will release this version (6.0Lxx) for all their scanners, rather than sticking us previous adopters with the 3.2Lxx series, but who knows. Maybe I haven’t found the actual issue yet. Also makes me wonder what happened to version 4 and 5, but I don’t overly care. It works, and that’s enough for me! Good luck, and comment if you do or don’t get it to work.

Adobe Licensing Failure

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cs6Like pretty much every other Mac systems administrator in the country/world who deals with Adobe, I’ve had my fair share of annoyances. This last couple weeks, there’s been a new one where CS6 just magically forgets its license, and reverts to trial mode, except in my lab case where users can’t launch the license manager, so the app they’re trying to launch just cycles and quits.

Adobe just today announced the “fix” ((I use quotes because Adobe has basically said they’re not 100% positive because reproducing the issue for them has been inconsistent. Which makes sense since only maybe 5% at most of the machines in our labs have had this issue)), as annoying as it is here. It’s a bit annoying that it took them so long to resolve, and even more annoying that it took them several days to even acknowledge that there was a problem, but at least there’s a fix, and I won’t have to re-image all the labs in the process. The long and short of it, is that the Photoshop 13.0.2 and 13.0.3 update apparently corrupted the license database to a point where something stopped working. I’m not sure if it was date related as well (so when the year rolled over, it was an issue, or not).

Anyway, I’m going to roll out the fix myself on Monday when the building is empty (we’re having a power outage for a good portion of the day, then the rest of the day should be free for me to make some changes).

Special thanks to Greg Neagle’s always awesome blog Managing OS X. If not for it, I would have pretty much felt alone with this issue, and probably not had the power behind me to push Adobe toward a fix… thankfully Greg is rather influential. =)