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Apple silicon

A Guide to Startup Modes for Intel and M1 Macs

From Startup Manager to Internet Recovery on Intel Macs, and how to engage each of those in an M1 Mac. With comprehensive diagrams.

January 18, 2021 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: 1 True Recovery

Intel Macs have 14 different startup modes and variations, each engaged using different key combinations. One True Recovery replaces those with a single action and GUI with help. It’s a big step forward.

January 17, 2021 Macs, Technology

M1 Macs radically change boot and recovery

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Unlike Intel Macs, M1 models always start booting from internal SSD, and can only offer full Recovery from there too. This has benefits, and some drawbacks too.

January 14, 2021 Macs, Technology

Stibium 1.0 will now benchmark your SSDs

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Improved tests, statistical analysis, and interface, together with a 21 page Help book detailing its range of tests in 5,000 words. Ready to use for real.

January 11, 2021 Macs, Technology, Updates

Last Week on My Mac: Intricacies of the boot disk

Boot disk volume layout is intricate in Big Sur. M1 Macs lose the EFI partition on their internal SSDs and gain two more for APFS. Contents of /System/Volumes has also changed.

January 10, 2021 Macs, Technology

How to benchmark your storage using Stibium

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Detailed tutorial steps you through getting accurate and reproducible benchmarks for your disks. Also further projects and tests you can try.

January 6, 2021 Macs, Technology

Disk read and write tests go random in Stibium 1.0b6

Now with proper random write and read tests, sophisticated analysis including group medians and linear regression, and detailing reporting.

January 4, 2021 Macs, Technology, Updates

Let’s make 2021 the year of Disk Utility

There’s no more critical app on your Mac, yet Disk Utility has suffered years of neglect – years in which APFS has grown many new features, and all Disk Utility gets is bugs and workaround.

January 1, 2021 Macs, Technology

Getting SSD performance data which make sense

Can M1 Macs really defy the laws of physics and read files from SSD at around 12 GB/s? Or are their performance improvements more modest?

December 30, 2020 Macs, Technology

Internal SSDs can read files at extreme speed

Using 140 files of sizes 10 KB – 2 GB, the M1 read files significantly faster than a T2 Mac, but the latter wrote files slightly quicker. Highest read rate on the M1 was 10.8 GB/s, which seems almost incredible.

December 28, 2020 Macs, Technology

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