Month: October 2022

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In setting up the new time machine drive, it somehow figures that I ended up plugging in a 10 Gbit/s drive into a 0.480 Mbit/s port, thankfully the only one on that dock 😅

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One of the things I’ve been wondering for a while now is how the performance of macOS’s EXFAT driver is representative of its peers. It’s notably slower than what you would see in NT, but not so bad until you go from the sequential 1M to random 4K part of my choice benchmarks. Once you hit the randoms, it goes form “I wonder if that’s lack of optimization in the driver, or the I/O system design” to abysmal. But to be fair that is the worst performing metric anywhere, and I’m more interested in the sequential performance. 

Well, having a nice shiny (or should I say, mat?) Samsung T7 Shield that was on sale, I decided to do a little test cycle. EXFAT, FAT32, HFS+, and APFS. This drive is designated for Time Machine duty, so I have no need for it to remain on a interoperable file system.

Using AmorphousDiskMark 4.0.

EXFAT as formatted out of the box:
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 586.42        691.32
  SEQ1MQD1        - 594.45        690.05
  RND4KQD64       - 21.75         13.68
  RND4KQD1        - 21.70         13.48
FAT32 as formatted MS-DOS (FAT32) from Disk Utility:
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 516.03        690.32
  SEQ1MQD1        - 596.97        691.80
  RND4KQD64       - 21.56         13.64
  RND4KQD1        - 21.50         13.51
HFS+ as formatted Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) from Disk Utility
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 612.39        820.77
  SEQ1MQD1        - 578.25        691.00
  RND4KQD64       - 120.48        55.44
  RND4KQD1        - 18.33         14.70
APFS as formatted APFS (Case-sensitive), after converting from MBR to GPT from Disk Utility.
  Test            - Read MB/s     Write MB/s
  SEQ1MQD8        - 733.22        818.84
  SEQ1MQD1        - 617.40        684.06
  RND4KQD64       - 121.67        55.13
  RND4KQD1        - 21.27         13.83

This makes me suspect the performance lossage is more to do with how optimized the FAT drivers are. I should really repeat this with one of my USB flash drives where the performance sucks to begin with, but I don’t want to spend all day on this :^o).

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When I heard about Hocus Pocus 2, I was some what skeptical but also hopeful. As a kid, I greatly enjoyed the original as far as halloween family friendly films go.

The sequel, in a great many ways rehashes bits but also comes into its own. I’m glad that the three reprised their roles, as the antics just wouldn’t be the same. I also love that moments after being resurrected for the second time that they break out a musical number, “The witches are back”.
In the original, the Sanderson sisters are always portrayed as villains. Silly and slapstick in moments, but villains never the less. Needless to say the old formula of fools bring witches back from the dead and they run amuck in Salem is still integral to the story. But it’s also nice to see the different directions taken by the new group of young fools, and look back at what made the sisters into villains in the first place.
And then there’s the ending. It was beautiful and awesome sauce, and in light of how the Sanderson sisters and the young fools get along, I think it was a great finish. Not to mention the book got a bigger role and after running amuck in ’93, it seems that they were incorporated into the local festivities, lol.
I really loved the ending. The film as a whole was enjoyable enough, having grown up watching the original. But the finale is what really made the movie, IMHO.