MacDirectory Magazine

DEPARTMENT BEEBE > MACDIRECTORY’S TECH GODDESS Q>Solid state drives are very expensive. Other than the lack of moving parts, what is the advantage over a hard drive? — Jay, South Carolina A>It depends on the manufacturer, the capacity, and the internal controller. SSDs are quiet and generate very little heat. They are much more resistant to damage and they do not suffer from head crashes that can occur when a hard drive is jarred. By and large, they tend to be slower than many hard drives but a good quality SSD can have a sustained read speed of around 350 MB per second, which is around twice that of a good hard drive (although some hard drives can crank it out from cache at a good 3GB per second. There are some caveats, however. The larger the capacity of the SSD, the faster it is because it is able to gang a stack of internal storage elements and read from them simultaneously. A budget-minded SSD with a much lower capacity will be dramatically slower. As for longevity, SSDs will hang in there longer than a HD but there is a limit to the number of reads/writes, although you can count on several years of reliable use. For me, the bottom line is cost. Am I willing to spend three times as much for a SSD? Not yet. Q>I have a file that I think may have been infected by some sort of malware or virus. I do not want to trash it and I can’t launch it because of the infection, but I need to pull the text out of the file. What do I do? — Lexi, Nebraska A>You need two things. One is a good antimalware/antivirus application. The second is a content extraction tool such as CanOpener from Abbot Systems . It may be growing a little long in the tooth (for example, it doesn’t recognize Safari as a web browser) but it does an excellent job and allows the user to extract a range of text, images and even embedded QuickTime movies. It also offers quite a few options, such as text cleanup, the extraction of URLs, tag stripping and more. Once you have retrieved the desired content, run your antivirus/antimalware application to isolate the files and trash ‘em. Q>If I use my MacBook (a 2006 CoreDuo) for an hour or so it tends to get pretty hot. Could this indicate a serious problem? — Farhad, California A>Hard to say from waaay over here. If it starts to cook within a few minutes of firing it up, there might well be a problem, particularly if you notice any discoloration MACBOOK of the bottom of the laptop or if this is a change from when the MacBook was new. If you would like to keep an eye on the temperature, check out CoreDuoTemp at http://macbricol.free.fr/coreduotemp/ (no guarantees on the software by the way, but it has received positive reviews from users). If this heat issue is unchanged from when it was new (and they canheat up, by the way, especially if you’ve installed a faster hard drive) you could try checking your energy control panel. If you’re not using wireless at the time, you can also reduce heat by reaching up to the menu bar and turning Airport off. Q>I’ve heard of utilities that can increase hard drive space by making use of a hidden section of the drive. Can you recommend any particular utilities? — Martin, Tenessee A>Actually, I’d rather not. These hidden sectors are actually used for certain operations and it’s best not to mess with them. Besides, considering the dirt cheap prices for hard drives, you might as well spring for an extra drive. If you decide on an external drive, get one with the longest warranty you can afford and, if you are choose a fast drive (7,200 RPM or faster) make sure the enclosure includes a fan (hopefully a very quiet one) and that it has ports for the fastest connection that your Mac can handle. 28 MacDirectory

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