The Unbody MacBook’s FireWire Deficiency - What Were They Thinking? [Updated]
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
I love my unibody MacBook. I really do. It’s a lovely-to -look-add, fast, and so far reliable and glitch-free performer. I could hardly be more pleased with it.... except for one thing. After 2 1/2 months of ownership, I’m more convinced than ever that Apple’s dropping FireWire support on the smallest unibody notebook was a major blunder.
That conclusion was brought into sharp focus last weekend. Having determined that I’m unlikely to ever go back to using a PowerPC Mac as my main production tool, the mirror clone of my 17 inch G4 PowerBook’s hard drive that I’ve kept on a very nice SimpleTech Duo Pro 1 TB external hard drive had become somewhat redundant. The cloned system saved me from a lot of tedium and inconvenience last fall when some sort of system corruption hobbled the PowerBook, enabling me to just plug the Duo Pro Drive into a FireWire port and transparently switch to using it as my boot drive until I got around to doing a clean system reinstall of Leopard on the laptop’s and internal drive.
When I first set up the clone to the Duo Pro Drive last fall, it was also via FireWire (the drive supports both FireWire 400 and 800, plus USB 2.0 and eSATA connections) and took three or four minutes to complete. However, cloning the MacBook’s hard drive would have to be done via a USB 2.0 port. USB drives are also bootable, theoretically allowing you to run an Intel Mac from an external drive over USB provided the drive is initialized using the GUID Partition Map format.
However, when I originally set up the Duo Pro Drive last fall, I initialized and partitioned it using the Apple Partition Map format, which is bootable for PowerPC Macs, but only readable for Intel machines (while vice versa applies to GUID formatted drives). I could clone the MacBook’s drive to a volume formatted Apple Partition Map, but the clone wouldn’t be bootable, which made it seem sensible to reinitialize the drive as a GUID volume before proceeding with the clone. You can specify your chosen partition map option in the Options sheet of the OS X Disk Utility formatting pane.
I was sorry to have to erase the PowerBook’s cloned backup, since there was still plenty of room on the 1 TB drive, but it seemed the sensible plan under the circumstances.
I used OS X Disk Utility to reformat the drive, and was a bit disconcerted at how long it took to set up the partition map, which had previously been accomplished on over FireWire for the PowerBook in just a few minutes. Oh well, maybe GUID formatting is more complex and time-consuming, I rationalized, fidgeting while the process took what was probably only 10 minutes or so, but seemed interminable.
You can also clone drives using Disk Utility’s “Restore” option, but I decided to use Mike Bombich’s excellent Carbon Copy Cloner utility, which has worked really well for me in the past, and offers functions that Disk Utility doesn’t, such as serving as a backup utility. When you select a source volume, CCC displays the contents of that volume (including normally hidden items). Uncheck items that you don’t want to back up, select a target volume, and press the clone button. CCC also is smart enough to scan the source and target volumes for files to be copied, and only copy only files that have changed. You can also schedule automated backups with Carbon Copy Cloner, which backs up your data to an ordinary filesystem that you can browse in the Finder. To restore your backup data, just select your backup medium as the source drive and the backup destination as your new target volume, and let CCC do its stuff.
I commenced the clone process, and went off to do other things. Returning a couple of hours later, I was taken aback to discover that the progress bar had barely moved in the interim. Had the MacBook crashed? Nope. Had Carbon Copy Cloner locked up? A check with the Force Quit dialog confirmed that it was still responding to the system, so that wasn’t it either. I opened the partition window, and some files had been copied, but there were an awful lot more left to go.
I persevered, letting the clone run through the day and evening, some of the time in the background while I did my regular work (thanks to OS X’s superb preemptive multitasking capability), but the MacBook hadn’t been restarted for a couple of weeks, and toward the end of the evening, performance, especially dialed up to the Internet and using Web browsers, became sluggish and erratic, although the machine never crashed. I finally gave up, went to bed, and left the MacBook and Carbon Copy Cloner to their own devices, the progress bar still having only advanced about half way along. Nor was it finished in the morning when I checked, although more progress had been made.
In the end, the clone run finished successfully about 24 hours after it was launched, far, far longer than it took roughly the same amount of data to be copied when I called the PowerBook’s drive over FireWire from the much slower 1.33 GHz PowerPC machine.
I was of course curious to see if the cloned system would boot the MacBook, and I established that it was indeed bootable, and least technically. Startup using the SimpleTech drive over USB took about 10 minutes, and performance, if you can call it that, once the boot was completed mimicked the speed of continental drift — it would be understatement to say it wouldn’t be practically usable. Reverting to the MacBook’s internal hard drive restored the machine’s normal, lively performance.
I had also previously noted that Time Machine backups to a different, SimpleTech Pininfarina 7200 RPM external hard drive, which is USB-only, also took substantially longer than it had with the PowerBook, so I began wondering whether USB throughput is malfunctioning on my MacBook. This is just agonizingly, excruciatingly, unacceptably slow. Surely this can’t be performance that Apple imagines is an adequate substitute for FireWire’s sparkling and speedy performance?
Or perhaps it is. A bit of research on the Web revealed that I am not alone in this complaint, as you can see on these forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5973794&tstart=0
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-71789.html
It’s all rather discouraging. the unibody MacBook is such a beautiful computer, but Apple’s bonehead decision has rendered it partially crippled. Regular data transfers can be done speedily using Ethernet, or I suppose some sort of wireless transfer if one is so equipped, which I’m not. I knew I was going to miss FireWire, but I didn’t realize the deficiency would be this drastic, and having no practical boot volume alternative is a serious handicap. Unfortunately, I have very little optimism that Apple will restore FireWire support to the MacBook, but I still have to wonder: “what were they thinking?!
Update: Reader FP writes:
Hi,
As a MB-FW user I would like to upgrade to a new 13" FW capable MB. I need FW for audio interfaces and fast hard disk's so i share your frustration with the lack of FW on the new MB.
Therefore I would suggest to add this MacBook FireWire petition link..., I guess all we can do is sign this petition and hope...
http://www.petitiononline.com/MB1394/petition.html
kind regards,
FP
Happy to do so. I hope Apple can be persuaded to come to its senses on this FireWire thing, but with USB 3 coming, I have to concede it's not a very lively hope.
CM
Note: Letters to PowerBook Mystique Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context.
Opinions expressed in postings to PowerBook Mystique MailBag are owned by the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or PowerBook Central management.
If you would prefer that your message not appear in PowerBook Mystique Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published.
CM