Mac Pro status update

On Tuesday some electricians performing unannounced work in the building cut the power to my apartment. This caused the boot drive in my circa-2006 Mac Pro to fail. After several days’s work, I’m glad to report that mt Mac Pro is now happy again: freshly reinstalled & restored from backup, updated & configured the way I like it, and—most importantly—backed up again.

I have abandoned Boot Camp and moved my Windows environment to a VMware image file on my boot drive. My original reason for creating a Boot Camp partition—playing Windows games—turned out not to be as compelling as I had predicted. I discovered pretty soon after creating the partition a couple of years ago that my Mac and its graphics card were already too outdated to play most of the best new games well. I realized that I that had not booted into Windows in more than a year. A dual-boot configuration like Boot Camp is great if you need it, but it’s a hassle otherwise. I got rid of the Boot Camp partition mostly for reasons of convenience:

1. Because it is now just an ordinary file in the file system, I can now back up the Windows VM’s disk image alongside all the other files on the volume.
2. I can suspend the virtual machine—something that’s not possible when running a Boot Camp volume in VMware Fusion.
3. I can move the VM from one disk to another easily.

I’m still waiting for the Synology DS-1812+ to ship from OHC in Glattbrugg. I ordered it Tuesday and paid for it by bank transfer today. I received no response to an emailed query into the status of the order today, and I find the a bit disconcerting. I’ll chase them tomorrow if I don’t see some progress by midday.

Update 2012-05-14 12:00 UTC: The Synology DS-1812+ arrived today. I put my disks in and created a new RAID 5 array. (I’ll switch to RAID 6 when I acquire a new batch of drives.) I’ll do some function and performance tests later in the week. So far, so good.