Louwrentius

In the past, as a Mac user, I've used separate external drives for Time Machine backups and Super Duper clones but I'm not happy with that. External hard drives make noise and create clutter.

I'd like to move away all my storage from my living room (or home office) and put it in another room or even closet.

A NAS may help with that but a NAS does not solve all problems. The main problem being the reliability of network-based Time Machine backups. Those NAS devices pretend to be Time Capsules, but there's always the risk that Apple breaks compatibility with a future update.

From my experience, Time Machine backups are only 100% reliable with local attached storage - like external hard drives.

Now there is a cool technology called iSCSI. It's basically a storage protocol tunneled through your home LAN network instead of a USB / Firewire or Thunderbolt cable. Most NAS devices support iSCSI and allow you to carve out some local NAS storage and present it to your computer through the network as if it was just local storage. Since iSCSI uses your Gigabit network as a transport, you can achieve transfer speeds of around ~110 MB/s easily, which should suit most needs*.

This is very cool, because you can export entire hard drives through the network to your computer. Your computer does not see the difference between an external USB hard drive and a hard drive exported through your NAS to your computer. iSCSI is totally transparent from the perspective of the operating system.

This trick allows you to create bootable Super Duper clones of your boot drive through the network. I would just hook up an external USB drive to my NAS and export it through iSCSI.

In case of an emergency - when your boot drive dies - you can boot from this external hard drive. Just disconnect it from your NAS and hook it up to your Mac.

Because hard drives attached through iSCSI are seen as normal storage, you can also encrypt them with the Apple build-int whole-drive (or whole-partition) encryption.

Now there is one caveat. Mac OS X does not natively support iSCSI, it has no native iSCSI initiator (client). In contrast, Windows 7 does have a very good iSCSI initiator. I think it's a shame, but Mac users must buy an iSCSI initiator from either:

1. GlobalSAN for $89
2. Atto for $195

I've only used the GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator and it seems to work fine. I believe that $89 is well worth the money: all your storage tucked away from your home office or living room.

Another caveat is that iSCSI requires reliable networking or otherwise there is a possible risk of data corruption, so I would not advice using iSCSI over a wireless network connection, although it is possible.

For the most popular NAS vendors, I've added some tutorials on how to setup iSCSI.

1. Synology
2. QNAP
3. Thecus

P.S. The GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator does support sleep and hibernate, in contrast to what some tutorials may tell you.

When you use cloud services, you are storing your data on other people's hard drives. The moment you put your data within a cloud service, that data is no longer under your control. You don't know who will access that data. Secrecy is lost.

Instead of using services like Gmail you may opt to setup some virtual private server and run your own email server, but that doesn't change a thing. The cloud provider controls the hardware, they have access to every bit you store on their platform.

If you encrypt the hard drive of your VPS you need to enter the encryption password every time you reboot your VPS. And how can you remotely type in the password? On the VPS console, a piece of software written by and under control of your cloud provider. They can snoop on every character you enter.

This may all sound far-fetched but it's about the principle of how things work. If you store unencrypted data on hardware that is not owned by you and under your physical control, that data cannot be trusted to stay secret.

If you care about the secrecy of your data, you should never store it with a cloud provider or any other third party.

I believe that the price you have to pay for any decent secrecy of your data is to run your own physical server. This is way more expensive in terms of time and money than using a cloud service, so it's up to you if it's worth it.

Although your own server will probably prevent your data being souped up with dragnet government surveillance, it will still be difficult if not impossible to protect you from a targeted investigation by a government agency.

A government agency can obtain physical access to your server and physical access is often the deathblow to any secrecy / security. Even if you implement encryption in the right manner, you are only decreasing the chance of their success of accessing your data, you are not eliminating their chances.

And in the end, a $5 wrench will probably do wonders for them. It seems that it even does wonders against encrypted hidden volumes.

But there may still be a small benefit. If a government agency requires a cloud service provider to hand over your data, they can do so without your knowledge. A gag order will prohibit the cloud provider from informing you. However, if the servers are your own and are located within a building you own, either privately or as a company, you are at least aware of what's happening. That may or may not be relevant to you, that's up to you to decide.

In Accidental Tech Podcast episode 18 (love the show), I learned that John Siracusa was thinking about buying a new Mac Pro for gaming.

I believe that gaming on the new Mac Pro will be a mediocre experience.

Driver support: as John mentioned himself, the video cards are 'professional GPUs' used in workstations for computing, CAD etc. These cards and especially their drivers under Windows are not geared towards gaming performance.

The performance and quality of Mac OS X drivers may be improved dramatically over the past years, but if you like to play games exclusively under Windows, you will probably be disappointed when you switch to bootcamp.

Crossfire support: you have these two ridiculously fast GPU's and for years on the PC platform, you can stack them together to achieve insane performance (SLI / Crossfire).

Mac OS X does not seem to support crossfire (or SLI). If you can't benefit from crossfire, you're paying a lot of money for a machine with one idle but very expensive videocard. That sounds like a ridiculous waste of good money.

Assuming that the hardware supports crossfire, if you would run Windows, then you may hit the driver issues associated with pro cards.

Upgrading: upgrading can be cost-efficient as most games are GPU not CPU bound, not an option for the Mac Pro. Even the new Thunderbolt interface does not have sufficient bandwidth to hook up one or more external high-performance videocards, aside from the fact that this will be insanely expensive.

If you really needs the horsepower of a Mac Pro for other purposes than for gaming, sure it's the fastest mac you can get, but otherwise, I believe there's a better deal to be had.

We don't now what the new Mac Pro will cost in a configuration suitable for gaming, but it will be 'a lot'. I believe that for one new Mac Pro, you will also be able to buy:

1. a mac Mini with reasonable specs (it's easy to replace memory and storage);
2. a high-quality 27" display @ 2560x1440
3. a ridiculously fast PC that will outperform the new Mac Pro when it comes to gaming.

I know that some Mac users don't like the idea of having a PC at home, but if you are into PC gaming, there's no other choice in my opinion if you want a good gaming experience.

I had high hopes for my 27" iMac (2011) but gaming performance anno 2013 is just mediocre at best. And I can't use it as an external display with a PC, only with a Mac.

So I sold my 27" iMac and used the money to buy a separate 27" display and Mac Mini. I also ordered a 'ridiculously fast PC' which I hope will allow me to play all modern games on max quality settings for now and the upcoming year. And if required, I can swap out the dual GPUs and replace them with something better over time, if I need to.