On WD Red NAS Drives - <AUTHOR> https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-red-nas-drives/ <comment><USER2> >SMR is tested and proven technology that enables us to keep up with the growing volume of data for personal and business use.

Absolute baloney. SMR is useful if it allows you to attain capacities otherwise unattainable, which isn't the case here. Note that the _higher capacity_ Red drives _don 't use_ SMR. Older Red drives of these capacities, and non-Red drives of these capacities, don't use SMR.

Also, notice how now they're openly admitting that these are SMR drives. Nowhere in this post do they admit that they previously deliberately concealed this fact.

EDIT: Also note that they talk about these being "drive-managed SMR" drives, and they are, but they reportedly don't advertise themselves to the OS as being drive-managed SMR, as they're supposed to do as per the ATA specifications (unlike other WD DMSMR drives which do). They literally designed the drives themselves to lie about this.

>Additionally, some of you have recently shared that in certain, more data intensive, continuous read/write use cases, the WD Red HDD-powered NAS systems are not performing as you would expect.

They literally built a NAS drive which can't handle RAID, and are acting like this isn't their failing.

<comment><USER3> From the blog:

"The data intensity of typical small business/home NAS workloads is intermittent, leaving sufficient idle time for DMSMR drives to perform background data management tasks as needed and continue an optimal performance experience for users."

A NAS drive, which features RAID specific firmware no less, is _very_ likely to be put in a RAID, and rebuilding the RAID after replacing a disk is exactly the opposite of an intermittent workload.

What they should have done is this:

\- Change the name slightly, "WD Red Lite" or something.

\- Make sure the product information page (and firmware if applicable) says this is a DM-SMR drive.

\- Say it is intended for single-disk or RAID-1 (mirror) setups, and is not recommended in RAID-5, RAID-6 or similar setups, with links to their Red Pro disks for that.

That would allowed them to capitalize on the "WD Red" name as something consumers have heard about, while also not right out lying about a very important aspect of the product.

<comment><USER4> An Ethical company, with Ethical Marketing would do that

WD has proven they are anything but ethical with this move, I moved from Seagate to WD awhile back for many of my personal drives, looks like it is time to move back to Seagate or Toshiba from now on..

<comment><USER5> Both Seagate and Toshiba do the same. You have nowhere to move.

<comment><USER4> Kinda... They do sell undisclosed SMR drives into the Desktop and external Space, but they both have come out to Affirm that they do not do that in the NAS space

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/04/seaga...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We've rigorously tested up to 8 drives" \- bullshit. An 8-bay synology will fail a RAID rebuild every single time. If you're lucky, it'll work after the 3rd retry - which will be about 2 weeks later because of how slow it is.

This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned, they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" \- instead it's "there's nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".

<comment><USER7> I think the worst part of this fiasco is that the drives may appear to operate normally until the moment when the raid is most vulnerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is a horrendously bad response, no apology, no admission of guilt, probably written by the legal team.

I am a total layman w.r.t Hard Drives, but it seems pretty simple (please correct me if I'm wrong):

\- They used a technology that impacts performance, that allows them to make higher capacity drives for cheaper.

\- The technology used prohibits them from being used in certain application context (citation needed/general consensus?)

\- They marketed the product as being suitable for those certain application contexts, when they aren't.

\- They come out with a blog, telling consumers to buy their more expensive drives instead?

<comment><USER9> So it seems like ultimately, what they've done is to move what used to be "Red" into "Red Pro" and make "Red" a more budget oriented line (without clearly communicating this in advance).

The only reason to do this is to trick customers into buying the wrong product by accident! There is literally no good faith reading of this change. If they wanted to provide better value for the people who don't mind the SMR performance characteristics, that's great, but that would involve clearly marketing the line as such, not simply redefining what "WD Red" means.

<comment><USER10> It's brand exploitation. They build a good brand, than sacrifice it for short term gain to rip off customers, while building a new brand to replace it. It's very common in the fashion industry (Gucci, etc)

<comment><USER11> Sort of like how Pyrex used to mean borosilicate glass, which has a low coefficient of thermal expansion, and is thus oven-safe.

This was the case for sixtysome years.

Then some douchebag decided that Pyrex wasn't a material, it was a "brand", and started slapping the name on kitchenware made of soda-lime glass, which will straight-up explode if you treat it like borosilicate.

<comment><USER12> war on drugs was their reasoning; not sure if it's true or acceptable and yeah I'm pretty amazed it flew in the US.

But then another brand by Corning is the same, they had a range of unbreakable product called Corelle, the new stuff since it got sold off just isn't the same.

<comment><USER13> > war on drugs was their reasoning

Uh what ? What do you mean, I don't see any relationship between Pyrex and the war on drugs _at all_ and I'm really curious !

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure how their PR dept spun it but borosilicate glass is incredibly resistant to sudden changes in temperature as well as having better chemical and acid resistance making it ideal for chemistry lab work, presumably some news stories broke about 'amateur chemists' using Pyrex cookware for a different type of cooking. It's not like borosilicate is a controlled material though, the reason for the switch is likely that soda lime glass is significantly cheaper to produce, they did suggest that their soda lime glass was more mechanically durable but then again borosilicate glass is also known for being mechanically durable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is probably an archival worthy example of corporate PR speak/spin around _" we got caught"_. SMR is pretty clearly not the use case for what they branded "RED" for.

Wishing them a VW level wave of karma.

<comment><USER16> They're also upselling their Red Pro and Gold lines. Sleazy.

<comment><USER17> I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part.

The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars.

My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.

WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.

I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).

<comment><USER18> > _buy a competitor 's drive_

Unfortunately... The competitor(s) you want, no longer exist! Here are some facts.

* Seagate - WD's main competitor - historically didn't have a reputation of high reliability in the industry [0][1]. Its ST3000DM001 [2] drive was terrible enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which is extremely unusual for a hard drive. In terms of reputation of reliability, WD was better, and HGST (Hitachi) had the best.

* Then WD brought HGST. It was kept as an independent operation for a while, since it was required by the regulators. But now it has been fully merged into WD. As parts of the deal, Toshiba received some hard drive assets from WD, thus, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba are the only three hard drive manufacturers, forming a worldwide oligopoly. Wikipedia has a great diagram showing the process of corporate consolidation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg)

* Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too [3].

So what can we do? Not much. Buy Toshiba exclusively to make WD and Seagate less powerful? Maybe. But none of them is honest in the SMR affair. Nevertheless, relatively speaking, I do find that WD's denial has made the other two more honest comparatively.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8355860)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110902)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959)

<comment><USER17> There are quite a few other competitors. They make SSDs. It's a different price/performance curve (lower on the low-end, higher on the high-end), but as I said, reliability trumps all.

In the early days, I waited to adopt SSDs because of horror stories about wear leveling algorithm bugs causing early failures (because SSD makers wanted to eek out a little bit of extra speed). Speed is nice-to-have, but fast, unreliable storage has negative value to me.

On the flip side, if I now can't trust HDDs, I won't buy them. 8TB is nice-to- have, but reliability is critical. 8TB of unreliable storage has negative value to me.

I mean, I was pretty productive in the days of 133MHz computers, 32MB of RAM, and 1.6GB disk space. I prefer gigahertz of multicore performance, 32GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space, but it's not worth sacrificing reliability for. A computer failure can cost me a week of time.

If it all worked, I'd have a 1TB SSD RAID and an 8TB HDD RAID, each with two drives so if one fails, the other goes on.

That's not just me. A random computer buyer might now know better, but if you buy a computer and something breaks, whoever makes it devalues their brand. If the HDD makers collude to give untrustworthy storage, they won't have a market left.

I'll mention cloud storage is a competitor too.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as little as one year when powered off. I realize disk is the new tape, I didn't realize the hard drive makers would take it so literally...

As far as I am concerned, SMR are unfit for any purpose other than hyperscale archival storage. If you work for AWS Glacier, good for you, but those drives should never ever be sold to consumers.

<comment><USER18> > _Unfortunately NAND Flash is not an archival medium, as data can fade in as > little as one year when powered off._

A marginally-related comment: Curiously, HDDs are not totally immune to this problem in the long run. Many types of EEPROMs (basically used by everything that has a CPU/MCU inside) only have an officially data retention duration of 10 years, beyond the date, there's no guarantee by the manufacturers that the firmware won't be lost. Yet surprisingly, most consumer electronics work fine after one or two decades, indeed it's because the EEPROM manufacturers are being conservative, not to mention that most electronics are stored room temperature.

There is wild variations of rated lifetime in different microcontrollers, a most common rating is 10 years, but some are 40 years or even 100 years at 25 °C. It indicates that it's related to the semiconductor process, and it also implies EEPROMs have a lot of potential but it's expensive and/or there are too many uncertainties to make any guarantee. How long will today's technology last in the wild is still largely untested in practice.

Long story short, I see EEPROMs as a time bomb of the digital (dark) age. Imagine when a future archeologist wants to download data from a HDD made in 2010, only to find that all firmware and parameters in the EEPROMs are gone, permanently bricking the electronics, even when the platters, motors and the head are good.

Conclusion: In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium.

<comment><USER20> > _In terms of data archiving, SSDs are bad, HDDs are much better and suitable > for most people, but tape drives are still the real archival medium._

What do you think of optical media like BD-R?

I've heard that the inorganic substrate they use these days is decent for archival.

<comment><USER21> M Disc claims to sell DVD-R and BD-R discs that are good for a thousand years. Many modern disc burners support burning to M Discs already. They're a little pricey though.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Having built this reputation, we understand that, at times, our drives may be used in system workloads far exceeding their intended uses.

A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.

<comment><USER23> I'm wondering if we're living on the same planet as these people. They literally put NAS in the _name_ of the drive??

Does NAS drive arrays exist outside of a RAID? Is there such a thing in consumer, prosumer, or professional setups?

<comment><USER24> Single-drive NAS exists. Apple's now-discontinued Time Capsule is probably the most famous example.

<comment><USER25> That true, but isn't exactly the most common use-case, though, or what most people would assume.

WD's actions are still inexcusable, especially because the non-SMR and SMR models cost pretty much the same. No savings being passed on to us. Pure greed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The only thing I wanted them to say was:

 _" These are the drives we currently sell which use SMR. When we use SMR in the future, we'll disclose it."_

Had they done this, the whole snafu would have actually made me _more_ likely to buy WD drives than before!

But they didn't do it. Oh well.

<comment><USER27> Same! And I _still_ don't feel confident that the Red Pros are actually not SMR. Has any independent outlet confirmed that yet? Or am I stuck buying Toshiba next?

<comment><USER28> Toshiba does the same thing too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22906959)

<comment><USER26> However, when asked, Toshiba was explicit about which models do and do not use SMR: [https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop- disk-d...](https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/16/toshiba-desktop-disk-drives- undocumented-shingle-magnetic-recording/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In EU we have a conformity warranty which basically gives you the right to return the product (or demand a partial refund) if it does not meet the advertised specs. [1]

Does it apply in this case? IANAL but my guess is that it should apply, as it meets two of the prerequisites:

\- are not fit for the specific purpose required by the consumer, of which he/she informed the seller at the moment of conclusion of the contract, and which the seller accepted;

\- are not fit for the usual purpose of goods of the same type;

[1] [https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer- topics/buyin...](https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/consumer- topics/buying-goods-services/guarantees-warranties/guarantees-warranties-in- france/legal-guarantee-of-conformity/)

<comment><USER30> I'd guess that the german "Sachmangel" would apply here. However, this law applies to the seller - so every dealer would have to start arguing with WD about getting their money back. Sachmangel does not apply to the same extent for business customers...

<comment><USER31> IANAL but doesn't _sachmangel_ require the seller to know about the drives being SMR when the purchase happens?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please > consider our products designed for intensive workloads.

It seems very strange to argue that customers should just know beforehand what they need, while also at the same time acknowledging the hiding (or at the very least, omission) of the information customers need in order to make that decision.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, that's terrible advice. They advertise these as high-end prosumer drives.

To the product manager at WD who is inevitably reading this: if your hardware doesn't live up to your own marketing, I'm not going to throw _more_ money your way. I'm switching to your competition.

<comment><USER34> The WD product manager's response: "Bwahahaha!!! Seagate's drives are crap too, and we own Hitachi! Where are you going to go now? Bwahahahaha!"

<comment><USER35> We can always stop buying HDDs.

<comment><USER34> I've read that SSDs can't be used to replace HDDs for long-term archival use: if you leave them powered off for too long, the data degrades. I can store data long-term on a regular HDD and stick in a closet or safe-deposit box and then get it out after a few years, plug it in, and read it just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "We're sorry you bought your drives for the clearly advertised use. Shame about them being kicked out of your RAID - sounds like you should have paid a little more! May we interest you in some more expensive drives? Don't worry, you can keep the ones you bought as paperweights or door-stoppers."

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a pretty awful "I'm sorry you feel that way" response. Also, thanks to HN for highlighting this misleading setup in the first place (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise).

I happen to have replaced a failed drive in my NAS box with one of these. I just checked the logs for the rebuild time and while my array has 8T, I'm only using 3.3T so it had to rebuild about 800 GB (this is Linux software raid on an older 4-bay synology diskstation). It took about 7 hours end to end, which while not amazing, is still ~30MB/second.

To be clear, this was on a Saturday night, and I don't use my NAS box for plex serving or anything (nor do I use ZFS, so I totally understand the rage of folks with random I/O rebuilds that have been screwed by this). Is everyone else assuming a rebuild of a very active NAS box?

To reiterate, I still disagree with WD on this, but I'm not holding my breath for a $5 after-laywers-fees class-action settlement check :).

</comment><comment><USER38> Meanwhile Seagate says unequivocally that SMR isn't useful for any NAS application...

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/04/seaga...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2020/04/seagate-says-network-attached-storage-and-smr-dont-mix/)

Seagate does seem to think SMR _is_ applicable for desktop use, however. But that's a fight for another day...

<comment><USER39> Reasonable response. WD did insane decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It seems quite unfortunate we're coming up the other side of the U shaped price graph for HDD technology. From collusion between the three manufacturers and a consistent push towards flash it's unlikely we'll see any further reductions in price per GB without major performance hits like SMR.

This wouldn't be a problem if flash were cheap enough in the volumes required for archival level storage, but it isn't. Flash storage is actually going up this year as demand continues to increase.

I suspect there's no ready answer for those that hoard data now or in the future.

<comment> core-questions You sure about that? I remember reading comments like this when drives seemed to be "stuck" in the 300gb range, and again when 1-2tb was about as big as you could get for a while. Now we have 16TB drives; so is there really some issue for those who want to hoard?

Honestly, how big is your personal hoard anyway if a few 16TB drives won't cover it? Isn't it the case that at some point you will have amassed more media than you could possibly consume?

<comment><USER41> bluray quality video is about 13GB/hr for 1080p or 33GB/hr for 4K. it's cost prohibitive for people to accumulate a huge amount of this content legally, but torrents are still a thing. it adds up really fast if you aren't willing to prune your collection.

there isn't currently a ton of 4K content available, but there's lots of 1080p. if you rip/download enough bluray 1080p to watch an hour every night, that's almost 5TB per year right there. if there were enough 4K content to support your habit, it would be more than 12TB a year.

<comment><USER42> Assume average movie length of 90 minutes and 4k Blu-ray price of $20 (I don't buy physical Blu-ray's but found some year or two old recent marvel movies cost about that much - new releases cost more, typical boxsets come out as costing less per item)

So that's 50GB/20$. Or $400/TB. So the content to fill those hard drives is about 5x the drives yourself. So it's not infeasible that people could fill them with legal movies.

Not to mention TV shows, video games, and content that is much denser in GB/$.

<comment> mark-r When my kids were young and could ruin a DVD just by taking it out of the case, I put together a home theater PC and ripped all the kids DVDs to it. There's well over 100 movies on that disk, and I still have the original DVDs for backup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They say they rigorously tested that the drives can handle 30 overwrites per year without going into a GC storm (180TB/6TB = 30) From those numbers, you won't exceed the duty cycle as long as you throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don't issue reads or writes during that time. More transparency is needed, whether or not the product is as bad as my back of the envelope calculation suggests. For example, what's the maximum sustained 4kb random write iop rate for the drive? What's the sustained sequential bandwidth?

<comment><USER44> > throttle your raid rebuild to take 12 days, and don't issue reads or writes > during that time

So, 12 days of downtime for the NAS. Doesn't sound like a very NAS-specific product to me. That's 3.3% downtime in 12 months from a single HDD failure. 12 days of sweating on another HDD not failing during the rebuild process.

Not fit for purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> When is the last time you contacted customer care and got useful advice for a product such as hard drives.

I am wary of so many differentiated products out there. Just in case I want to save 5 cents on an SSD so I can get a 50x increase of 95% latency. Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume. I'd rather see a good drive that is made in large numbers rather than 100 SOUs that can never really be tested.

<comment><USER46> >Reliability is most important and the way you get there is volume.

Is that really true? The likelihood of unrecoverable sector errors goes up as the number of sectors increases.

Reliability is only solid if you have a good backup/recovery plan being practiced. Multiple copies on multiple formats in multiple locations. Original content on SSDs? Make a back up on HDD and/or recordable disc formats. Keep a copy at a friend's/parent's house. Keep a copy in the cloud (Backblaze as an example). If the data is worthy of backing up, do it right.

<comment><USER45> Volume of production, not of disk space.

As for backup that is a vastly unmet need. You have the carbonite scam that is on the rush Limbaugh show (unlimited yeah right) the corporate backup clients that turn home working to not working, and tape drives that cost more than 10 times the size of a drive they can back up, not counting the cost of the tapes, high probability that you pick a bad technology generation of lto, high probability that restore fails, etc.

The computer press has been telling people to back up for years but effective solutions have never been there for the consumer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I didn't have any background on this and didn't know what SMR was. Apparently the background is: people try to add these things to RAID arrays, and when they do some rebalancing, the RAID software rejects the disk. The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write performance. The controversy is that it's pretty shady to sell a drive as a "NAS Drive" when the drive is too slow to be usable with any RAID software.

(I will spare you my rant on how bad RAID software is. But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.)

<comment><USER48> > The reason is because they use "SMR", which severely hurts random-write > performance.

It hurts random-write performance _after a threshold_ , when an on-disk staging area becomes exhausted. For short bursts, the drive behaves well -- it probably would legitimately work in a RAID array if the array were initialized from a clean slate and not rebuilt.

> But this is yet another interesting edge case that RAID software doesn't > handle and reacts by just blowing away your data.

It's not obvious how a RAID controller should "handle" this. The drives have no outward indication that they suffer from random write saturation. From the controller's perspective, the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.

<comment><USER11> > the degraded performance looks very much like a drive failure.

Sure, but given the choice between "During a rebuild, it looks like another drive isn't doing so well, so I should give up and trash the array"

and

"During a rebuild, it looks like another drive isn't doing so well, so I should notify the administrator and meanwhile try to maintain as much redundancy as I can"

which is the sensible choice?

<comment><USER35> There is no choice to be made. Once too many disks fail the entire array has to be taken offline and that's exactly what happens.

<comment><USER49> Disks "failing" is the problem. If you treat drive state as binary (flawless / eject), you can easily eject too many drives for errors on different 0.000001% of data, crashing the array along with the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is making a bad situation , adding oil to it, and lighting it on fire hoping that the problem will go away unnoticed.

I have a lot of WD(HGST) (more than 2 PB) in service as of now. I will never buy anything WD until they come clean on shit like this. They should talk to VW about Karma and how it bites your behind.

</comment><comment><USER51> Is there a list of known not SMR WD RED drive model numbers? I have 4TB REDs in my Synology but they are a few years old; is there a way I can find out?

<comment><USER52> Here is a list of known SMR drives [1].

The newer WD##EFAX ones are SMR but if your drive is a few years old then it's probably a WD40EFRX which is NOT a SMR drive.

[1] [https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of- known-...](https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/list-of-known-smr- drives.141/)

<comment><USER53> Except only the EFAX drives with 6TB or less capacity.

The 8TB and larger drives use the exact same WD##EFAX model number, but aren't SMR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Did the text get cut off? All I read was some corporate PR nonsense, did I miss the real content? Never buying WD drives again!

<comment><USER55> Agreed, it would have been better if they posted nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > If you are encountering performance that is not what you expected, please > consider ... our WD Red Pro or WD Gold drives, or perhaps an Ultrastar > drive.

So, they're saying the new low end WD Red drives are unfit for purpose. And boy do they have a solution just ready and waiting to go.

Which presumably, uses the older CMR (eg normal) tech to do the same thing. They probably just rebadged the older drive models that work. ;)

</comment><comment><USER57> As I'm WFH next to my Synology and look down at my ESD bag-wrapped spare WD Red, I can't help but be reminded of Peter Graves glancing down at his tray with a perfectly cleaned fishbone in "Airplane!"

</comment><comment><USER58> "WD Red HDDs have for many years reliably powered home and small business NAS systems" Yes, the non SMR ones."

You are misleading the consumer and should have called it WD Pink, because the SMR drives are a totally different product.

"If you have purchased a WD Red drive, please call our customer care if you are experiencing performance or any other technical issues. We will have options for you. We are here to help."

Other than refunding or providing a replacement non-SMR drive without extra cost to the consumer are the only options.

</comment><comment><USER59> You just have to look at the BackBlaze hdd reports to know WD has been out of the game for a long time. What really upset me was when they bought HGST out in 2012, but fortunately that management doesn't seem to have impacted the HGST quality as much as I feared, but time will tell.

Also, stop using raid 5 people. The risk of failure cascades given the build times on such large drives means it should be almost totally deprecated imho.

<comment><USER60> What should you use instead of RAID 5?

<comment><USER61> RAID 6 (adds an extra parity disk) or generalized erasure coding (more flexible but not so easy to manage).

<comment><USER62> Nitpick: RAID-5 and RAID-6 don't use "parity disks". They stripe the parity across every disk, just like RAID-0 stripes data, so you lose a disk worth of capacity (or two disks worth of capacity in RAID-6), but the parity is on every disk. Having a disk dedicated to parity would be an incredibly burdensome write bottleneck, which is exactly what RAID-4 is, and why you probably haven't heard of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is exactly one of those cases where the ambulance-chasing class action lawsuit lawyers are useful. I would eagerly join a class action lawsuit against ALL the drive manufacturers on this issue.

<comment><USER64> So, you get your check for $3.50 or a coupon for $20 off a new WD Red "NAS" drive from their web store. And then what?

Most people bought multiple drives at a time, spending hundreds of dollars. This seems like a prime candidate for technology-assisted small claims court, for the full purchase price of the counterfeit drives.

<comment><USER19> You do not need to get a non-trivial compensation for the threat of a class- action lawsuit to be a deterrent for behavior like this. It's the price the defendant pays that matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I guess we are boycotting WD now or voting with our wallets saying how garbage a response this is. What's a good alternative to WD reds?

<comment><USER66> Sadly, I've bought a lot of WD over the years. Seagate seems to be a minefield, HGST is owned by WD, leaving Toshiba as the only remaining option. Looks like the N300 is their line of NAS-optimized drives:

[https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal- ha...](https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/toshiba-internal-hard- drives-n300/)

[https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard- drive/#m=111...](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard- drive/#m=111&t=5200,5400,5700,5760,5900,7200,10000,10025,10500,10520,15000&f=2&sort=ppgb&page=1)

They also have surveillance video storage drives and enterprise drives that might do well in the same applications.

<comment><USER67> According to this, Toshiba has been doing the same thing...

[https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing- toshiba-s...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba- seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure)

<comment><USER68> But Toshiba did it on their desktop drives, instead of on NAS drives which you buy specifically for their reliability

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I just hate this rebranding ... Red vs Red "Pro".

It used to be so simple

Green - slow cheap, Blue - faster more pricey than green, Black - fastest more pricey than blue, Red - fast as Blue but pricey but good for NAS

</comment><comment><USER70> I will never purchase another Western Digital product unless they make a MAJOR about-face on this. Western Digital owns SanDisk, so that goes for them too.

</comment><comment><USER71> They suggest moving to Red Pros if performance is a concern, but it's not clear from the post if the Red Pros are also SMR-based platters. I have a couple of new ones (soon to be) integrated into a NAS. Anyone know if they are SMR or CMR?

<comment><USER33> The problem is that they're believed to be CMR _right now_ , but they could change that this afternoon and wouldn't tell you.

<comment><USER70> Yep. Given this response, I have no desire to buy any Western Digital product—of any type, for any purpose—ever again. They knowingly sold a drive that would obviously be inadequate for its advertised use-case. Who knows what other false advertising they might also be doing.

<comment><USER33> "We never said that it didn't have sandpaper on the heads! If you want a drive without sandpaper, consider upgrading to our Pro line."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> For some reason I remember most HDD customers are more technical people. So I wonder how much this is going to cost them long term.

</comment><comment><USER73> Has WD also bamboozeled NAS Raid enclosure sellers such as Synology? If you go into their compqtibility lists you will find the WD Red with SMR (the WDxxxEFAX series) listed as compatible, but with a specific reference to their SMR KB page which just warns not to mix SMR and PMR drives in the same raid volume.

[https://www.synology.com/en- global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutoria...](https://www.synology.com/en- global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/PMR_SMR_hard_disk_drives)

<comment><USER74> > _bamboozeled_

Defrauded is the word you were searching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I had no idea why my lightly used NAS RAID array with 2 NAS-rated WD drives was failing every few months. Now I know why. Last year, I was researching a small hedge fund and found they had a heavy WD position, they cited metrics like $/gb and called WD a cost-leader. Now I know why.

</comment><comment><USER76> Oh wonderful. I have 4x12TB RED disks in my Synology. I wasn't aware of this at all until seeing this post. Guess I'll be looking to slowly replace them before they go belly-up. Unfortunately, it seems with each swap out I risk the very problem this is all about.

<comment><USER77> Fortunately, it's not used on 8TB+ disks yet, so you're safe.

The problem will be getting replacements for these, as it's not safe to just buy HDDs anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> SMR explained:

Be aware that this drive uses SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) to achieve such high density in a small package. If you don't know what that is, think of how shingles on a roof are laid out partially overlapping each other - that is how the data is laid out on the drive platters. While this allows significantly higher capacities, it creates some complexity to writing. If the drive needs to write data in the middle of existing data, it can't just "place" it there like a HDD using PMR technology because other data also overlaps it. What it has to do is put the data in a temporary location, then re-write all the shingled data afterwards to the end of the track break.

</comment><comment><USER79> After reading this, my only question is, what do we do now? Western Digital already bought HGST and discontinued it. Maybe they felt safe enough to pull this because they know the alternate options are limited.

<comment><USER80> I thought it discontinued just the HGST brand name. HGST branded drives still seem to be available in the market (or some markets). Last year's Backblaze hard drive reliability report also had some HGST drives near the top of the rankings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Class action lawsuit in 3... 2... 1...

</comment><comment><USER82> Who got the 3.5" part of HGST? Wikipedia says Toshiba, but WD is selling drives under the Ultrastar name, not Toshiba.

I mean, where do you go for reliable storage at this point?

<comment><USER83> HGST is owner by WD. They have operated independently for a while, unsure of the current state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So basically don't buy WD Red for RAID and buy WD Red Pro for any real NAS application. It's a way to silently raise prices, I guess.

<comment><USER77> wd red pro are 7200rpm. Power consumption and heat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> SMR is such a horrible backwards "technology", I wonder why vendors still push it aggressively on users after all these years.

1\. Its performance is noticeably worse than CMR.

2\. The density increase SMR provides compared to CMR is not that much. It's 25% at most.

3\. SMR is _not_ a separate evolutionary path that can be developed further to have increasingly more density compared to CMR. It is more like a variation of the same technology which provides slightly more density in exchange for serious disadvantages. SMR and CMR both directly depend on, and benefit from developments in platter densities. When a new, denser platter generation is introduced, CMR and SMR benefit from it same.

4\. A _huge_ portion of the drive must be reserved as a non-SMR cache area to mitigate the performance penalty SMR brings. Notice that this is an extra area that does not exist on a CMR drive so it reduces density increase SMR brings.

5\. SMR drives have much larger DRAM cache to mitigate the performance penalty (64MB on a CMR drive vs 256MB on SMR drives), increasing the cost for that part.

6\. Logic and mechanism of writes are much more complicated on a SMR drive than a CMR one. Drive is separated into different zones, data must be stored on a cache zone, then new data should be written into permanent zones in an optimal manner in background during idle time, managing different zones, cache area, rewrites, background tasks etc. all these makes the drive firmware much more complicated. Compared to a SSD firmware it is actually worse of both worlds: You're getting all the complexity of a SSD firmware with a worse performance than a regular hard drive.

7\. What is even more worrying than those technical details are that vendors are sinking more and more resources and pushing very hard on technologically dead-end SMR technology. WD even wrote a PR piece called a "Zoned storage initiative" for trying to paint host managed SMR technology the future of storage and developed a linux filesystem called zonefs to back it up.

8\. Despite all those shortcomings, they don't even sell SMR drives cheaper than CMR drives.

TL;DR: SMR is a harmful technological "drug" HDD vendors use to buy at most few years of time in platter density but with a very serious side effects.

<comment><USER85> I wonder if they have a bunch of binned trash and pushing it into the lower end consumer spaces is a way to get rid of it.

<comment><USER84> I wish they were. They're actively pursuing it while discontinuing CMR. 5 years ago 1TB CMR laptop drives were abundant. Nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find a non-SMR one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Western Digital has updated the blog post after this HN post went up and listed the technology used by their different hard drives in an update at the top of the post.

All the backlash seems to have worked.

</comment><comment><USER87> Are those drives really safe for RAID-1 arrangements? I read somewhere they could not survive resyncs, so why RAID-1 wouldn't be affected, either after a resync or a faulty drive swap?

</comment><comment><USER88> As an owner of Red drives, it's surprising WD would trot out a new acronym for in device features to a group already literate in acronyms.

It just makes me wonder how easily they believe their customer base can be placated.

Had I known I was not receiving what I thought I had purchased, I would have likely purchased a different drive.

The least WD could do is unilaterally extend the warranty of these misrepresented drives to easily deal with any fears, if they really believe in their products as such.

It will be interesting to see if the MTTB on these drives is in a smaller spectrum of time.

<comment><USER89> Extending the warranties on SMR drives does _nothing_ to solve the performance issues. The drives were marketed for use in NAS RAID systems, but the abysmal performance (due to the drives' SMR) in many cases will cause the NAS or RAID system to kick out the drive as a bad drive.

Given that RAID rebuild times are increasing as the size of the drives are increasing, and SMR exacerbates the longer rebuild times, these drives should not be used in the NAS or RAID systems for which that they were marketed.

By obfuscating the use of SMR in their WD Red line, WD willfully and intentionally harmed their customers.

<comment><USER88> I agree that it was completely misleading and that extending warranties solves nothing SMR related specifically for performance.

An advance ship program to swap drives with SMR is what should happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Is anyone really surprised? HDD manufacturers have been misleading consumers since they all started advertising kilobytes as 1000 bytes

<comment><USER91> It wasn't just marketing. Historically, a kilobyte was 1024 bytes in memory contexts where everything was based on powers of two but nowhere else. This was obviously confusing because everywhere else used kilo as 1000 — a 420MB hard drive would have been measured in units of 1024 for capacity and 1000 for transfer speed.

When the SI units were standardized in 1998, it helped drive manufacturers advertise larger numbers but it also rectified this accident of history where a standard prefix had been used with a non-standard definition in only one part of computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> There really needs to be some kind of capital punishment for companies pushing bullshit like this and deliberately misleading customers. As a bonus we would also get rid of homeopathy and MLMs.

EDIT: Not capital punishment for the people involved obviously, but the companies should be severely sanctioned. Possibly even closed. The involved management should be prohibited from holding management positions in the future for 10 years or more. Oh, and all bonuses paid out since the fraud started should be reclaimed with personal fines.

</comment><comment><USER93> Jesus what a pile of drivel. Zero commitment to addressing the misleading advertising or making amends.

</comment><comment><USER94> Silly customers. It is your fault of course. Using NAS branded hard drives in common NAS configurations.

</comment><comment><USER95> WD is far too large a company to have a soul so there is zero chance they're actually sorry.

<comment><USER96> It has nothing to do with a soul... it's just the nature of large business to revolve around marketing and accounting to maximize profits, while disregarding sound engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> TL;DR: We know we were concealing a material fact from our customers. Please don't sue us.

<comment><USER98> ...except that they didn't say "please".

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Has anyone seen a benchmark example of e.g. an array rebuild, and how large the difference is?

<comment> mark-r I think the issue is that with the bad drives, an array rebuild will never finish. One drive will degrade to the point where it simply stops responding.

<comment><USER99> I understood that to be mostly a problem with hardware controllers, those tend to be more picky? (someone I knew tried a hardware RAID of WD Greens back in the day, that also exploded regularly because of response times)

I'd thought it would just slow down a lot when software tries continuous writing, and am curious how much that is. (ideally, this is something WD should publish, since they claim it's fine, but ...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Something I don't understand - why does the drive slowing down cause a rebuild to abort?

<comment><USER35> Imagine your garbage collector runs for 30 seconds. It will cause timeouts.

<comment><USER100> Ah, so various RAID systems hard-code a timeout that's too short for shingled drives?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> Is this why my Synology 4 bay, had had 8 WD reds in the last 4 years? I don't even use it much. It's just always powered on. Drives me insane that I have to pay 200gbp a year just to replace drives that supposed to last years.

</comment><comment><USER102> This HDD is dead anyway</comment>


Introducing Jetpack, Call for Participation - <AUTHOR> http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/05/introducing-jetpack-call-for-participation/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am the OP, and there is another discussion on the same here

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619548></comment>


Beggars can be choosers: Evaluating potential investors using GraphXR - <AUTHOR> https://neo4j.com/blog/evaluating-investor-performance-using-neo4j-graphxr-and-ml/ <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR? watch this: [https://youtu.be/ychTbO6xuDM](https://youtu.be/ychTbO6xuDM)</comment>


Link Between Muscular Strength and Cognition in People with Major Depression - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2678215?redirect=true <comment><AUTHOR> The full correct title is "Association Between Muscular Strength and Cognition in People With Major Depression or Bipolar Disorder and Healthy Controls", but that's far too long for the 80 character limit.

</comment><comment><USER2> Handgrip strength is a poor metric for overall fitness. Much of it is genetic.</comment>


The Pirate Bay files suit against big media cos for DDoSing them - <AUTHOR> http://thepiratebay.org/blog/86 <comment><USER2> I swear the comment section attached to that link has an average IQ of somewhere between fish and salamander.

<comment><USER3> In French we say the IQ of an oyster :)

<comment><USER4> In German, we say the IQ of a Frenchman

<comment><USER3> I'm surprized this type of xenophobic comment is given 8 up votes. Is mobbing french people still considered cool ?

The tracks to the poster leads to perdue university. Insulting a community on behalf of german people ? How courageous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If nothing else, this will be something for groklaw to focus on now that SCO has finally lynched itself.</comment>


Staying Ambitious on Diversity: New Diversity Goals for Gusto Engineering - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.gusto.com/staying-ambitious-on-diversity-new-goals-for-gusto-engineering/ <comment><USER2> Isn't things like "outbound sourcing exclusively for female candidates" is direct violation of California anti-discrimination laws?

A company can not discriminate candidates based, among others, on gender, sexual orientation, etc.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

Gusto's co-founder/CTO here. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions about our diversity program here, should you have any!

<comment><USER3> Can those of us that are not members of desirable under-represented groups assist you by not applying at Gusto?</comment></comment>


On the new Snowden documents - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/12/on-new-snowden-documents.html <comment><USER2> Snowden pretty much had _root_ \- he had access to more or less everything that wasn't airgapped, including things the NSA wasn't supposed to have direct access to as part of their data-sharing agreements. (Of course, some ECIs presumably _are_ airgapped - but _much_ less than you probably expect these days.)

Not everything is being published, however. There are details from GCHQ STRAP3 (location of individual listening sites) but only STRAP2 documents, and all details of personnel and telephone numbers has been redacted by the journalists (perhaps a little too broadly - for example as in the GCHQ "refer requests for disclosure to" telephone number, you could actually Google it! I think they know by now, however <g>). Snowden wanted to end mass surveillance and sabotage of public security products; not reveal their cryptanalytic advantage to targets. It's the journalists who are doing most of the selection, I gather - but they've seen the whole haul, including what is _not_ being published, and the picture is consistent, though (yes) incomplete.

My impression has been for some time that their cryptanalytic advantage is not actually vast, but their operational resources truly are. Throwing money at things doesn't magically give you breaks to the DLP - but it totally can buy you computing resources that can break 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman. (It mentions Cavium cores - suggesting large, parallel RSA/DH-optimised multipliers were on their HPC shopping list. They are much faster at 1024-bit than higher.) It can buy you insiders, or let you conduct operations that threaten or coerce insiders, or conduct astroturfing campaigns to frighten people away from encryption you can't break, or further the goals of your agency (which do not necessarily align with the government paying your way - it's not so much "oversight" as "don't get caught doing anything you shouldn't"). You can throw (a lot of) money at military contractors and hope some malware-by-committee comes out that you can use to hack anyone that looks interesting, grab intelligence or keys, or any of the above. And they typically attack from _every_ angle at once.

My take on the HPC resources is that they're mostly used as brute force CPU/GPU power for low-entropy situations - anything where passwords are involved may be vulnerable. Email an encrypted DOC, ZIP or RAR file to someone? They're going to at least _try_ it as a matter of course, even _en masse_ , but they're not going to give it much juice unless you're tasked.

Money can't give you magic. However you very, very rarely need magic.

<comment><USER3> Ed had root, but I don't think he took everything. Moreover, some of the news orgs were intimidated into destroying their copies both before and after the release started. I don't think the news orgs know everything.

It doesn't take away from your larger point, but we can't presume they know more than they've published. They probably do, but we don't know what they know and what they don't (either because it was omitted or destroyed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing to keep in mind.

It's inherently dangerous to assume that NSA doesn't pay much of attention to the breaking of fundamental crypto math based on these documents.

If they _did_ find a practical weakness in RSA and such, I think it's safe to assume it would be assigned the highest level of secrecy and simply won't be in range of Snowden's document sweep.

<comment><USER5> This seems to be a recurring argument: they have RSA breaking magic sauce in a safe in a bunker in a fort.

If they do indeed - surely they would at least employ it in the backend to decrypt data? The documents we are seeing are geared towards analysts and provided from the groups implementing various attacks/capturing/decryption functionality. They wouldn't even have to reveal anything - just "give us data, we'll send you back decrypted results". Yet they frequently set rather low expectations for decryption. And then theres the organizational question. Why have groups targeting VPNs, IPSec, HTTPS etc. when breaking RSA gives you a golden key to any of these?

What I'm saying is these arguments routinely devolve into "it's so secret, they can't tell their own employees or analysts and they can't use it for the capability could be leaked". At that point the consequence is that the magic RSA breaking sauce becomes pointless as you can't use it, certainly not for the objective the NSA has spent the last decade on: capture everything.

<comment><USER6> I see it like the judicious use of signals intelligence in WWII. If you use it for everything, you risk tipping the enemy off that their crypto is broken. You have to balance the benefit from the inherent knowledge leak from using it.

I'm not saying they have it, but if they had it, they would be foolish to use it all over instead of only on key targets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Overall I'd like to commend the writer of this document on what has been by far the most neutral writing I've ever seen on this topic. The writer still takes jabs at the NSA here and there (NSA and Tor, for example), but generally the tone is very neutral.

<comment><USER8> I think part of the reason for this is that his audience hardly need convincing at this point. If you're a software-security-enthusiast you'll want to know how security is being broken regardless if it's ethical or not. If for no other reason than to know how to make stronger security in the future. If you are a Snowden-supporter you don't need convincing. If you're just a security-aware "regular" person, you'll also be interested in what is and isn't broken in the world of encryption. If you don't care about any of this, like most of my family, you won't be reading this article. If you're still anti-Snowden and/or pro-NSA after all the stuff that has come out then you're probably hardcore/immovable in your position and you believe deep down that foreign terrorists are plentiful and out to destroy USA - in which case, this author can do nothing to convince you otherwise.

<comment><USER9> There are plenty of people out there who aren't paranoid xenophobes that think what Snowden did was wrong. I think Marc Andreesen and Benedict Evans from a16z are probably two names most HN readers would recognize. Edward Lucas (a reporter for the Economist) does a pretty decent job making a case against Snowden in his book The Snowden Operation.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Snowden-Operation-Greatest- Intelli...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Snowden-Operation-Greatest-Intelligence- ebook/dp/B00I0W61OY)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I want to engage into a debate about Snowden's actions at this stage of the game but that book's introduction seems to fit my description of a pro-NSA / anti-Snowden person. At least the opening paragraphs. It's up to the rest of HN to read that intro and see if they disagree with me and see something else in those words that I'm not seeing.

EDIT: I will acknowledge that the paragraph starting with _" This book is not based on complacency about the status quo"_ does indicate, at least to me, that he's not 100% anti-Snowden though. Perhaps I could grossly, and only based on the intro, paraphrase his opinion as _" Snowden just took things a bit too far"_. I can see that as a reasonable position to take. Even I don't think USA should just shutdown all secretive intelligence and pretend that there are zero terrorists.

<comment><USER9> _If you 're still anti-Snowden and/or pro-NSA after all the stuff that has come out then ... you believe deep down that foreign terrorists are plentiful and out to destroy USA._

I was taking issue with that bit. There are good reasons to think what Snowden did was wrong that don't involve paranoia about "plentiful" terrorists. You could, for example, draw a distinction between responsible whistleblowing and irresponsibly fleeing to a foreign country with literally thousands of classified documents.

<comment><USER10> You know that "responsible whistleblowing" has failed multiple times in the past right? Anybody who is upset with Snowden for not repeating the same pattern that failed to change anything, except the destruction of the whistleblower's life, is either unfamiliar with history or just completely illogical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find the story very telling. The NSA is one of the largest employers of mathematicians, and yet it appears that the NSA has had more success simply by using backdoors.

I have to wonder if academic progress (like defeating cryptographic algorithms) can be achieved under a climate of secrecy. Without the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, how much progress can be had?

<comment><USER12> Math can only get so far..for example RSA keys have a brute force weakness..25% of the keys can be brute force guessed if you do not worry about validating primes when using one of five methods for guessing primes and just rely on huge computation power...hence US gov entities in 2010 suggesting the move to other key systems.

Whereas the new key system relies on hardening of packaging to offset any flaws in the one-way functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why the writer claims the recommendations of the presidential review council have been "largely disregarded". Do we know that's the case?

</comment><comment><USER13> _During the period in question, we know of at least one vulnerability (Heartbleed) that could have been used to extract private keys from software TLS implementations. There are still other, unreported vulnerabilities that could be used today._

His analysis that there are unreported vulnerabilities in TLS implementations sounds definitive enough to think he knows some of these vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER14> Not at all. Given the history of TLS implementations, I would call "There are exploitable vulnerabilities" the null hypothesis, and require extraordinary proof that a particular TLS implementation doesn't have vulnerabilities.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps, but this is an academic security researcher we are talking about. To generalise massively, academics are very deliberate and conservative in their language.

If he wasn't aware of at least one unreported exploitable vulnerability then I would expect him to say "There are _almost certainly_ still other, unreported vulnerabilities".

<comment><USER15> I don't think the crypto engineering blog is where Prof. Green publishes his very conservative academic writing. It's a blog, not a refereed paper.

<comment><USER16> His academic communication mostly happens on Twitter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Erlang Garbage Collector - <AUTHOR> https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/erlang-garbage-collector.html <comment><USER2> > Each Erlang process has its own stack and heap

This is one of the cool things about the Erlang VM. Each process (lightweight thread) has its own heap! In other VMs threads can affect each other by generating garbage and causing GC pauses. In Erlang even the heaps are isolated.

<comment><USER3> How valuable is the property that other threads' GCs won't stop your thread if your thread bears its own full stop? It seems like a concurrent collector with a very small STW phase would be preferable. Lastly, the lack of shared memory certainly enables simpler GC schemes like this one, and it precludes all sorts nefarious bugs, but it also makes efficient parallelism impossible in many cases. Depending on your application, that may not be suitable.

<comment><USER4> These are good questions.

Concurrent compacting collectors are pretty tough however, and a single process STW should be much faster than a global one, since it will be (at worst) proportional in time to the per process heap size.

<comment><USER3> I suppose it would need to be compacting; Go seems to get along okay without compaction, presumably because it has value types?

<comment><USER5> Go has traded throughput for latency. The throughput of a semispace copying collector is very high for most workloads, but can suffer latency issues. There is literally zero cost to collecting garbage in the nursery with the algorithm described in TFA (a nursery collection has a cost proportional only to the live data), and the cost of allocating in the nursery is just incrementing a single value. However eventually you need to collect the entire heap, and it's still proportional to the size of the live data, which is usually the majority of the heap (since you've already collected the nursery at that point).

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I'm confused. Is Go's GC the semispaced copying collector or the TFA? Or neither? Or both?

<comment><USER5> TFA == "The Fine Article" so refers specifically to the Erlang Garbage Collector.

"Semispace" is one term to refer to the family of garbage collectors that Erlang's derives from. The heap is divided into two spaces, hence "semispace"

So Go's GC is neither. Go's gc is tuned for lower latencies, and that tends to rule out moving collectors (there are ways of having incremental moving collectors, but they complicate the runtime a bit).

<comment><USER3> Ah, thanks for the information and clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last year's post updated for Erlang/OTP 20. This is the number one information source on Erlang's garbage collection. Well written.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can someone more familiar with Erlang/Elixir say some drawbacks of BEAM? I'm learning Elixir now and as I become more familiar it seems very difficult to write buggy code.

If only it were typed, ah... (no, dialyzer doesn't count).

<comment><USER8> Drawbacks, well it's slower than other language ( Java, C#, Go ), it's not typed, the deployment / process liveness mechanisms are now useless with Kubernates / Docker that are better at doing that and language agnostic.

<comment><USER9> It _can_ be slow, or not. We wrote some serialization code in Elixir and Java, and the Elixir version was a little faster. It's good at that.

On the other hand, I had some bit twiddling code that was 13x slower than C. I know because I rewrote that section into C as a NIF and benchmarked. The nice thing then was my overall 95% Elixir app became about as fast as a 100% C app.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, beam is a pretty slow and unoptimized VM, CPU wise.

Which is not so important, as their strength is eliminating IO waits and context switches which are usually much costlier.

Their GC is top notch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please, those who control this site, if you're reading - don't use medium grey text with very light font weight on a a white background.</comment>


Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac? - <AUTHOR> Just purchased my first macbook and I'm already digging it. When it comes to Windows and Linux I have a standard set of apps for both programming and security auditing that I load up. I know what's available and where to get it.<p>With this new mac I've already loaded up some stuff but what else is available? What are some free, and even low cost "essential" mac apps I should look into? <comment><USER2> I'm recommending only free software here.

1\. Adium for chat. It is just awesome.<http://www.adiumx.com/>

2\. Quicksilver. if you just want an app launcher spotlight is already good at that. <http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list> [edit: updated link to point to the recent versions]

3\. Caffeine is small program which puts an icon on menu bar on which you can click to prevent your Mac from going to sleep,dimming the screen etc. Very useful when watching long flash movies. <http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/>

4\. MPlayer This is a video player which plays almost anything you can offer. Also comes with excellent keyboard shortcuts support making it the best video player on any platform. Most people prefer VLC though <http://www.mplayerhq.hu/>

5\. Flip4Mac For those videos that MPlayer plays poorly, typically WMVs Flip4Mac provides a fee codec which integrates with your quicktime player. [http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcompo...](http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx)

6\. HandBrake For ripping your DVDs to MPEG4, there is no better tool. <http://handbrake.fr/>

7\. Tweetie. if you use twitter, tweetie is the best mac twitter client by far. <http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/>

8\. Virtualbox This virtualization product from Sun Microsystems totally eliminates the need for parallels or Vmware if you plan to use the VM sparingly. <http://www.virtualbox.org/>

9\. Evernote <http://evernote.com/>

10\. Eigenclock. I find the OS X, menu calendar extremely limted. Eigenclock is a good replacement <http://www.twistedtheorysoftware.com/eigenclock/>

11\. Onyx for system tweaking <http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html>

12\. Transmission - bittorrent client <http://www.transmissionbt.com/>

<comment><USER3> Why does anyone recommend Quickisilver? It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness compared to Spotlight and LaunchBar?

I really wish it wasn't the case, but Quicksilver seems to have had its run and no one is stepping up to the plate to preserve it.

Most everything else you list is awesome though (although I think Evernote is far from essential and I'm not sure "free" is the right word for it ;)

<comment><USER4> QuickSilver is quicker than Spotlight. I don't want to have to wait a few seconds for Spotlight to find stuff... QuickSilver is usually instantaneous or very near it. Also, it doesn't depend on the spotlight indexing, so this means I can disable the spotlight indexing jobs which have a nasty habit of using up 100% of my CPU at random times while I'm doing something.

Also, I haven't had any problems with crashes or anything like that... works great here.

<comment><USER3> Spotlight is, generally, only slow the first time you search.

Usually it's as fast as LaunchBar except for the very first time it is used. It has a reputation of being slow from 10.4 that is no longer justified.

<comment><USER4> I've found that it is consistently a few seconds slower. It's not slow as such, just slower than QuickSilver. And when it come to app launching, these few seconds kill, imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Others mentioned here are great. In addition, check these out:

<http://perian.org/> \- adds native support to QuickTime for many video formats

<http://www.fluidapp.com/> \- Fluid, SSB (site specific browsers)

<http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/> \- LittleSnitch, Monitor and block outgoing internet connections

<http://www.skitch.com/> \- Skitch, screen capture and sharing

<http://derailer.org/paparazzi/> \- Paparazzi, Full screenshots of websites

<http://www.sequelpro.com/> \- SequelPro, MySQL gui (I like Querious, but that's a paid app)

<http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html> \- The Unarchiver, unpacker program handles almost every format

<http://freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013> \- Think, helps you focus on a single app

<http://www.heliumfoot.com/mercurymover/> \- MercuryMover, resize, move windows with keystrokes (If you're OCD about window sizes like me)

Other honorable mentions: Coda, Transmit, TwoUp, Typinator, UnRarX, CSSEdit

<comment><USER6> Dont't use Transmit. It's slow and they haven't released an update for months (years?).

Yummy FTP ist the fastest and feature-richest FTP-client for the Mac. It's synchronization feature is really good. (I bought both)

<comment><USER7> Transmit is every bit as fast as Yummy downloading and uploading a 10Mb file (S3 and SFTP), so I'm not sure what your impression is based on.

The last release was 11/24/08. It's always updated to take advantage of/fix bugs introduced by new OSes. There hasn't been a release in a whopping 5 months (?) because Leopard's been out for a while and there aren't any outstanding bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gitx is a native OS X GUI for git. It comes with a nice command line tool, gitx, that works like gitk. <http://gitx.frim.nl/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Cyberduck (ftp - <http://cyberduck.ch/>) Adium (IM - <http://adium.im/>)

<comment><USER10> I used Cyberduck for several years but some of the later versions became so buggy that I switched to Transmit. Haven't looked back since then. (Don't know if Cyberduck's stability has improved since.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1.) SteerMouse - tweak the mouse acceleration curve. If you're coming from a PC and you feel like your mouse doesn't move right, this will help.

2.) SizeUp - size and and position windows with hotkeys. For example, quickly set two windows to use exactly one-half of the screen each.

3.) Expandrive - mount S3 buckets, ftp sites, sftp sites as network drives. (Works great with textmate)

4.) Miro - excellent video player and torrent client with rss built in. Sort of like a torrent TIVO.

5.) Warp (<http://www.ksuther.com/warp/>) - adds some new methods for switching spaces. I have mine set to switch if I drag the mouse to a screen border while holding command.

6.) Also, if QuickSilver doesn't suit your tastes, give LaunchBar a try. Getting used to using one of those two apps pays huge dividends.

<comment><USER12> Another +1 for SizeUp, since I bought a display for my MacBook I love it. I also like if for "name your price".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> boundlessdreamz covered a lot, here's a few more (mostly commercial but still awesome):

1\. Things - Awesome task management - <http://www.culturedcode.com/>

2\. Mailplane - If you use GMail this is a must. - <http://mailplaneapp.com/>

3\. AppZapper - Remove everything about an app - <http://www.appzapper.com/>

4\. LittleSnitch - Filters and prompts on outbound ip connections - <http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>

5\. Undercover - Stolen Laptop Recovery app - <http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/>

6\. Fugu - SCP/SFTP App - <http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/>

7\. On The Job - Time and Expense Tracking - <http://stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob/>

8\. Versions - Awesome SVN client - <http://versionsapp.com/>

<comment><USER14> Cornerstone is a good alternative SVN client. Cyberduck is a pretty good general purpose SFTP/FTP/S3/etc client. I like billings better than on the job personally.

<comment><USER15> I find cornerstone a lot better than versions. Although moved to Git now and feel like an idiot for buying a subversion client!! :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> macports (<http://www.macports.org>) for installing unix utilities that are not already included in OS X.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> one of the guys I follow on twitter just recommended this:

<http://osx.iusethis.com/>

<comment><USER17> I was about to suggest that as well. It is tied to a very cool app called AppFresh. Recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here are some of my favs:

1) Quicksilver. (free) <http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver>

2) VLC Media Player. (free) It plays pretty much every type of video file. <http://videolan.org/vlc>

3) Skitch. (free) Essential for quick screenshots, and quick annotations of screenshots. <http://plasq.com/skitch>

4) Tweetie. (free - ad supported - or $20) The best native Mac app for Twitterring. <http://atebits.com/tweetie-mac>

5) TextMate. (~$54) It's handling of projects, bundles, etc. is excellent. <http://macromates.com>

6) HTTP Client. (free) <http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/>

7) OmniGraffle. ($100-$200) Excellent for constructing user flow diagrams. <http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/>

8) The Hit List. ($50) It's one of the best GTD apps for the Mac. <http://www.potionfactory.com/thehitlist/>

9) TinkerTool. (free) For customizing OS X. <http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html>

10) Secrets. (free) For easy access to hidden application preferences. <http://secrets.blacktree.com/>

11) Sequel Pro. (free) For accessing MySQL databases in a nice GUI. <http://www.sequelpro.com/>

12) Fluid. (free) If you have a commonly accessed site, Fluid is great to create a SSB (site-specific browser) for it. I have a Fluid SSB created for railsapi.com, which allows me to easily launch it with Quicksilver and start searching the Rails docs right away. <http://fluidapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Here's a related thread from last year:

\- Ask YC: Mac virgin wants to know, what would you install? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131241>

My earlier list <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131263> hasn't really changed but I do find the recently posted Black Tree Visor <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465334> to be very useful.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lots of excellent pointers from others...I'll add a few I haven't seen posted:

\- InstantShot: nice little screenshot utility (I use it daily)

\- VueScan: swiss-army knife of mac scanning apps if you need to hook up a scanner. Costs a little, but you get lifetime upgrades. Well worth it.

\- LittleSnitch: network monitor. tracks what kind of network activity your apps are up to. Costs a little, but also worth it if you value your privacy.

\- JollysFastVNC: fast and free VNC client (I've been using it over Chicken of the VNC).

\- OmniDiskSweeper: Disk utility shows you which files are hogging up the most hard disk space. Free. I also recommend many of Omni's other products. Omnigraffle (not free) is also excellent for diagramming.

Also, not mac specific, but the sqlite manager plugin for Firefox is also very helpful.

I don't know where others go to find different Mac apps, I usually hit macupdate.com (and sometimes versiontracker) these days, mostly out of habit, but would love to hear other recs for this.

</comment><comment><USER21> MacFUSE w/ sshfs, and MacVIM.

<comment><USER14> Or ExpanDrive. It's alot cleaner than MacFuse + sshfs.

<comment><USER22> Agreed - sshfs has some squirrely edge-cases that ExpanDrive handles very gracefully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> textmate

<comment><USER24> Coda

<comment><USER25> Coda is expensive ($99) but the convenience of working on remote files via SFTP within the program is unmatched. If your session gets disconnected in the midst of editing a file, nothing to worry about, Coda will automatically log back in for you and update the file you were working on when you save.

<comment><USER26> VIM does the same for free. $99 saved is $99 earned.

<comment><USER25> You're right, but then I could also argue that any of these programs can be replaced by installing a linux port via fink and a combination of shell scripts.

My point was mainly comparing Coda to other GUI text editors for the mac. It has other useful features such as one-window editing, integrated terminal, ability to preview CSS/HTML changes side by side with code, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Some of the things I use:

\- DragThing; you will never miss Apple's Dock, this is an absolutely essential desktop enhancement, e.g. to create multiple tabbed docks anywhere you want, with themes.

\- OmniWeb (now free); I've tried many web browsers, and I like this best. Safari engine.

\- MacTelnet (tabbed terminal). It now works for local programs and not just servers, so I use it instead of Terminal.

\- SnapzPro X (or alternatives), useful for doing more intelligent screenshots or video captures.

\- DesktopCalendar (by Takashi Hamada), a really nice use of space and very configurable. Also has a menu option.

\- Growl, for pretty and unobtrusive notification windows. This is actually really well supported by 3rd party applications.

\- SCPlugin, if you're a Subversion user; nice Finder integration.

<comment><USER28> I second OmniWeb. It's the best browser there is. The tab implementation is second to none, in particular the ability to discontiguously select multiple tabs. Site-specific preferences are also incredibly useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1password. A must that makes your life much easier.

<comment><USER18> 1Password's nice, but I've found Sxipper [1] to be better if all I need to use is Firefox. Sxipper has a really nice way of handling password changes, multiple accounts, and comment forms.

[1] - <http://www.sxipper.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If your file system ever gets corrupted, DiskWarrior.

DiskWarrior will reliably maintain and rebuild your FS. It will work when fsck fails and is better than the other paid alternatives. It looks like (and is) a Mac OS 9 port, but it's the same filesystem so no worries.

If your filesystem is ever, ever fucked, DW will save it if anything can.

It costs $100, so don't buy until when you end up needing it. But at that moment, buy it (unless your data is worth less than $100, I guess).

</comment><comment><USER31> Some stuff I use that I didn't see mentioned:

MenuMeters: <http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/>

Hyperspaces: <http://hyperspacesapp.com/>

Yojimbo: <http://barebones.com/products/yojimbo/>

Leap: <http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/>

</comment><comment><USER32> I've got my Macbook pro 6 months ago. The best thing I ever buy. I'm programming and I use to use a Windows and a FreeBSD box before. Here, some free and commercial softwares I use everyday:

1\. Terminal: Visor - Quake-style terminal <http://visor.binaryage.com>

2\. Uninstaller: AppTrap <http://konstochvanligasaker.se/apptrap/>

3\. SFTP: <http://www.expandrive.com/mac>

4\. Quick remote filesharing: <http://www.getdropbox.com>

5\. IDEA: NetBeans or ZendStudio

6\. Virtual machine: Parallels - <http://www.parallels.com>

7\. Text editor: TextEdit or TextWrangler - <http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/>

8\. VPN: The native OSX thing does the job

9\. Mobile sync/Addressbook: iSync does the job (Use <http://www.feisar.com/> to find your mobile plugin if iSync doesn't have it natively)

10\. SIP softphone: Telephone (works with Googlevoice+Gizmo5 and my local UK SIP provider) - <http://code.google.com/p/telephone/>

11\. Notifier: Growl - <http://growl.info/>

12\. Movie player: VLC or Quicktime+Perian codecs - <http://perian.org/>

13\. Chat: Adium

14: Desktop display: GeekTool - <http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/>

</comment><comment><USER4> QuickSilver: <http://quicksilver.en.softonic.com/mac> \- app launcher. Essential to a smooth OS X experience.

Adium: <http://adium.im/> \- general-purpose chat client

Cog: <http://cogx.org/> \- For those of us who don't like iTunes, or want to play FLACs.

WriteRoom or Scrivener: <http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom> | <http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html> \- if you like to write (those are not for code)

Textmate: <http://macromates.com/> \- if you're a coder.

Transmission: <http://www.transmissionbt.com/> \- for your torrenting needs.

</comment><comment><USER33> Editors: MacVim, Emacs.app (build from source `./configure --with-ns` -- f Aquamacs and last resort TextMate

Torrent: uTorrent

RSS: NetNewsWire

PDF, Document Reader: Skim

<comment><USER34> +1 NetNewsWire

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everyone is linking to Quicksilver. I am a former Quicksilver user, but I find it unbearably slow and bloated. Instead, I use Google Quick Search box, which does most of what Quicksilver does with much less bloat.

<http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/>

</comment><comment><USER36> Controllermate (<http://www.orderedbytes.com/controllermate/>) - This is an outstanding program that allows you to customize almost any USB keyboard / mouse / controller / joystick to do exactly what you want, with a very clever and powerful graphical scripting environment. I have a Logitech Dual Action (with NO Logitech drivers instaled) wired up to switch spaces on the D-pad, volume on one joystick, screen brightness on the other. One button plays and pauses iTunes. I use it to add volume buttons to my Das Keyboard. No more crappy HID drivers. You can also create custom acceleration curves for mice.

</comment><comment><USER37> This post might be useful:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/110065/must-have-tools- fo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/110065/must-have-tools-for-an-os-x- switcher/110178#110178)

It listed all the userful tools that would be relevant to a programmer.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for that... I was just looking for a syntax highlighter for Quicklook!

<http://code.google.com/p/qlcolorcode/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> (not free, but cheap)

taskpaper <http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper>

scrivener <http://www.literatureandlatte.com/trial.html>

curio + small pen tablet <http://www.zengobi.com/products/curio/>, <http://www.wacom.com/bambootablet/bamboofun.php>

</comment><comment><USER39> TextWrangler (free text editor), Gimp and Inkscape (free graphics) or Photoshop Elements ($90), OpenOffice (free) or iWork (office like from Apple $90), or MS Office ($150) depending on what you know and who you communicate with, Firefox browser (free), Xcode for Mac or iPhone development (free), Skype (free), Tweetie, no virus scanner needed for now, and an external hard Disk so you can use TimeMachine for backups are what I have added in the first 2 months with my first intel mac.

<comment><USER40> I like Smultron over TextWrangler (and I say this as someone who paid for TextWrangler years ago, before they made it free). Also, Adium is very nice if you use any IM other than Skype.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> There are lots of great suggestions here, one I haven't seen yet is Spirited Away. (<http://drikin.com/spiritedaway/>)

This app hides app you haven't used for a little while so the app you are using currently is the most prominent thing on the screen. I find it really helpful to declutter my screen in a non-invasive way.

You can also exclude things like video players and the like from being hidden.

</comment><comment><USER42> Developer: Coda, Cornerstone, TextWrangler or BBEdit, iTerm, ForkLift, Querious, Changes, iChm

Web Designer: CSSEdit, Flux, Dreamweaver, xScope, Xyle Scope, Picturesque

Researcher: Evernote, DevonThink Pro, ConceptDraw MindMap

User: LaunchBar, Overflow, Little Snitch, Super Duper

Web Junkie: 1password, Firefox, Tweetie, NetNewsWire, ClamXav, DoorStop Firewall, Net Monitor

Freelancer: TimeLog & GrandCentral

Photographer: Photoshop CSx, Portrait Professional, Aperture 2, GraphicConverter, PhotoReview

</comment><comment><USER43> I actively use firefox (and camino + safari to have multiple sessions for the same site), iWork, tweetdeck, birdshot, itunes, last.fm, VLC, uTorrent, Quicktime pro, snaps x pro, skype, textmate, parallels (though switching to VMware), RescueTime, DropBox, and QuickBooks.

About 40% are paid apps.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I see a lot of people recommending virtual pc but does anyone have anything to say about vm fusion? A buddy of mine was going to hook me up with a copy. I've used virtual PC on linux quite a bit but I was always frustrated with the lack of ability to bridge the networking.

<comment><USER5> I think it's great (trouble-free for me). No problems with networking and almost seamless. Though, I rarely use it for more than a few minutes each week. Just to test web pages out in IE. Which MultipleIE is great for:

<http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE>

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Home and End Key Fixer. I found my machine to be nearly unusable without it.

Quicksilver, to avoid the terrible GUI as much as humanly possible.

(I have my MacBook because it is the only non-Windows notebook with fully working suspend mode and peripherals. Why did you buy yours?)

<comment><USER11> DoubleCommand works great for this as well, even in Firefox 3, and includes a lot of other handy key-remapping.

<comment><USER45> DoubleCommand can cause kernel panics.

KeyRemap4MacBook will give you a lot more options.

<http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Terminal.app + Visor is a great combination for me since I use the command line so much.

</comment><comment><USER47> carbon emacs

</comment><comment><USER48> Quicksilver.

</comment><comment><USER49> Nambu Twitter client. I like it much more than Tweetdeck.

</comment><comment><USER50> There is a good list of free (as in beer) Mac apps at <http://www.freeapps.co.uk/mac>

</comment><comment><USER51> Just adding in LittleSnapper for keeping screenshots of sites / designs I like and also Wallet for keeping track of my passwords.

</comment><comment><USER52> I just reinstalled my mac today. Here is what i installed so far :

1-quicksilver

2-iTerm (terminal. with tabs)

3-Photoshop CS3 (cs4 is slow on my macbook)

4-Transmit

5-DropBox client

6-Textmate

7-Git

8-The Hit List (best osx app for lists)

9-LimeChat (irc client)

<comment><USER53> As of Leopard, Terminal.app has tabs.

<comment><USER52> Didn't know, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Quicksilver (App launcher)

Onyx (Maintenance scripts)

Apple Developer Tools (Terminal/GCC/XCode)

SubEthaEdit (Collaborative Editing)

Textmate (Defacto standard editor)

Cyberduck (SFTP Client)

Perian (Codecs)

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm going to be a fuddy-duddy and say: most of these apps are _not_ essential for the Mac. Lots of them are nice, but you can skip them entirely when you're just getting started.

Here are the ones I consider absolute essentials for my daily work:

MegaZoomer - <http://ianhenderson.org/megazoomer.html> \- lets you full-screen zoom any application. That mixed with TextEdit gives you the best word processor you'll ever need.

Quicksiler - linked all over - this will fill in every hole you have in your computer usage. I use it to fix a lot of shortcomings in iTunes, for instance, and while I don't use it as insanely as some people do, even light usage makes your life a lot easier. It's also a full-featured file browser, which is excellent.

Perian - <http://perian.org/> \- makes your life a lot easier when you're watching videos or listening to music, without forcing a reliance on the ugly VLC.

GlimmerBlocker - <http://glimmerblocker.org/> \- Unless you use Firefox, this adds every feature you'll need to every browser you've got. (Firefox is an _awful_ browser that rebuilds a lot of Mac features from the ground up, and so it isn't affected by this.) It blocks ads (selectively, so you can allow the ads you don't mind), blocks entire sites, and adds retroactive functionality to sites. The big one for me is the Youtube downloader.

Growl - <http://growl.info/> \- This one's really easy to abuse, but if you set it to notify you of all the really important things - FTP file uploads and long processes and so on - then you get a very nice way of keeping yourself informed of all your computer's goings-on.

Those are the ones that I absolutely need for my Mac. Here are the ones that are obscure-ish and rarely recommended and yet are terrific:

Max - <http://sbooth.org/Max/> \- converts every format but wma, so your library stays neat and organized without any complaints about iTunes.

Freedom - <http://macfreedom.com/> \- disables the Internet, so you can't procrastinate at all.

FuzzyClock - <http://www.objectpark.org/FuzzyClock.html> \- makes your clock much more humane.

Chax - <http://ksuther.com/chax/> \- Fixes a few things in iChat to make it an acceptable chat system (I really dislike Adium for a number of reasons).

</comment><comment><USER56> gcc (not installed by default)

</comment><comment><USER57> I just went through the same thing.

Follow me on twitter as I explore the world of OSX and my adventures with all things "Hackintosh": @cericsmith

Here's my list:

1Password -- Perhaps the greatest piece of Mac OSX software. You must try to believe it. Password storage/sync/creation/ID management at its finest.

<http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password>

Unison -- If Windows newsreaders hadn't stopped evolving around 1998, they might have come up with something like Unison in... 2150.

<http://www.panic.com/unison/>

MusicBrainz Picard -- For fixing the "Unknown Artist/Album" issues.

<http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownload>

BluePhone Elite -- Neat Smartphone/iPhone tricks with Bluetooth. Ever wanted to have your machine wake up or sleep when you were just out of range? This is an app for you.

<http://mirasoftware.com/BPE2/>

Toast Titanium 10 -- Sure, Leopard can burn discs... but Toast is much more than that, and it's elegance exceeds anything on Windows.

[http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/titanium/overview.ht...](http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/titanium/overview.html)

iLife 09 -- iPhoto's face rec. is just cool, and iMovie beats the snot out of Movie Maker.

<http://www.apple.com/ilife/>

Stuffit Deluxe 2009 -- Not as necessary as it used to be, but still nice to have available.

<http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/stuffit.html>

Parallels 4 -- Many people like VMWare Fusion, but Parallels 4 has support for a lot more configuration of the VM -- support for up to 8 processors, the ability to have VM's start off of CD and/or Disk Image/ISO, is killer.

<http://www.parallels.com/>

Little Snitch -- knowing when your applications are "phoning home" is important.

<http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>

DiskWarrior -- HFS+ disk maintanance package and more. Fix disk errors...

<http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html>

AppZapper -- Yes, theoretically uninstalling apps on the Mac is straight forward, but AppZaper gets all the flotsom and jetsom that would otherwise be left behind. Great for nuking preference files, etc.

<http://www.appzapper.com/>

ClamXav -- Ok, we know that Mac's don't get virii, per se... but this cross- platform, donation-ware AV tool gives peace of mind when running random software you download from the Net.

<http://www.clamxav.com/>

FileSpot -- Spotlight is nice, but FileSpot takes it to another level.

<http://mac.synthesisstudios.com/mac/filespot/about>

GimmeSomeTune -- integrates with iTunes and pulls/updates album art and lyrics, and works with Growl. Updates iChat status and images based on what you're listening to. Sweet.

<http://www.eternalstorms.at/gimmesometune/>

HighLight -- Instantly add file(s) or folders to your Spotlight search index.

<http://homepage.mac.com/superpixel/highlight/>

SimpleComic -- a great comic PDF viewer.

<http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/>

TED -- This program scours the usual suspects for new TV episodes and integrates with your favorite Torrent program to automatically download them!

<http://www.ted.nu/>

DropBox -- 2GB of free, sync'ed cloud storage for your Mac (or PC/Linux box). Incredible in conjunction with 1Password.

<http://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=lnx>

The Unarchiver -- Ok, so you don't like Stuffit? This will pull apart almost anything.

<http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html>

Movist -- A media player based on ffmpeg/VNC that has a more polished UI than VNC.

<http://code.google.com/p/movist/> VNC -- open and play anything.

Perian -- Add the ability to open and play most media formats that ffmpeg can handle inside of QuickTime.

<http://perian.org/>

Pixelmator -- who needs Photoshop? This $50 application is the bees knees. Cool UI, great features.

<http://www.pixelmator.com/>

doubleTwist -- Part media manager, part file conversion utility. If you need those TV shows on your PSP, this can handle it. Notably, doesn't support iPhone (yet).

<http://www.doubletwist.com/dt/Home/Index.dt>

MPlayer OSX Extended -- the benefits of Mplayer on OSX. More polished than VNC, more stable (at this point) than Movist.

<http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/>

FreeDMG -- The ability to create Disk Images/.dmg files.

<http://www.kelleycomputing.net/freedmg/>

Tweetie -- The newest and most controversial OSX Twitter program.

<http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/>

Boxee -- a "10 foot interface" for managing your media and Internet content sources such as Hulu.

<http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/>

SuperDuper -- quickly and easily clone your HFS drives.

[http://www.shirt- pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...](http://www.shirt- pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html)

iWork 09 -- Pages is what Powerpoint will never be -- Fun.

<http://www.apple.com/iwork/>

<comment><USER58> Argh. Encouraging people to use Stuffit is nearly criminal. Bloated, packed with adware, greedy with filetypes - it's a menace. If you're unfortunate enough to be given a .sitx file you may be forced to use their fairly awful free Expander, but paying for the full version would surely be grounds for a psychological review. If you really need to compress things that tiny bit more than normal .zip, there's always 7zip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Textmate - Best text editor hands down. Cyberduck - FTP client.

</comment><comment><USER60> What about... games? :P

<comment><USER18> World of Goo is a must-have, even for non-gamers. It's makes for a nice break from doing actual work. ;) <http://www.worldofgoo.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> iTerm <http://iterm.sourceforge.net/>

VLC Player <http://www.videolan.org/>

</comment><comment><USER62> Carbon Emacs

</comment><comment><USER63> * OmniFocus * CSSEdit

</comment><comment><USER64> Stuffit Expander.

<comment><USER8> I prefer The Unarchiver <http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html>

<comment><USER32> I've seen many time Unarchiver saying a archive was corrupted or was unable to decrypt with the right password. Now I use unrar in command line. (imported from macport) . Much better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> 1\. Quicksilver - There are already explanations on this and I don't like Spotlight that much.

2\. MacPorts - If you are a developer or you're just an open-source lover, this is a must have app for you. It has 5811 open-source programs ready to install, easy and... open-source! ( which is good... )

3\. TexMate - My every day editor, I don't use another one besides this one.

4\. Adium - For chatting.

5\. pgAdmin - For PostgreSQL administration. I don't use MySQL that much.

6\. Growl - Another must have for system notifications, I don't realy know why Apple hasn't put one in OS X yet.

7\. OmniGraffle - For Visio projects and such.

8\. Things - For task managing.

9\. Tweetie - The best Twitter client I've ever found.

10\. Transmission - For P2P file transfers. I don't like uTorrent very much.

11\. AppZapper - To uninstall programs. When you delete an app some configuration files are left behind, with this program all the files related are also deleted.

12\. Evernote - Well... to take notes! Even better if you have an iPhone.

13\. VMWare Fusion - For virtualization

14\. Scribbles - For those moments when you get inspired and just want to make some draws :)

15\. Adobe - Photoshop and Dreamweaver between others are a must.

16\. Teeworlds - Best game ever and... Open-Source!!!!

17\. Toast Titanium - For recording CD's and DVD's.

18\. ScreenFlow - To record your screen and make nice video editing

These are not by "like" order, they're by the order I remembered them. I wouldn't recomend installing iTerm because Terminal.app does the job nicely and it has tabs as well. I'll had more if I remember some.

</comment><comment><USER66> Cyberduck for FTP. Colloquy for IRC. VLC for video. Growl for notifications.</comment>


You won't find an angel in a dragon's den - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/1d7859b511fc

<comment><USER2> I've always wondered about the implicit economics of some of these angel groups. They seem to spend an awful lot of time getting to the point where they can write a small check. If the expected value of the rate of return of venture investments is ~20%, then it would seem they're barely making minimum wage.

On the other hand, contra the article, I've made angel investments after a pitch. Angels write small-ish checks, so making the founder do a song-and- dance over the course of many meetings would be uneconomic for him. It's a bit different if you're a partner at Greylock writing multi-million dollar checks.

<comment><USER3> In the UK there is a scheme called SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) which gives investors 50% tax relief on equity investments up to £100K per annum. This is great for startups, as it has resulted in a lot of people investing for tax efficiency (and hence why most angels look to invest up £50K in any single investment, so that they can spread the risk); however, the side-effect of this is that a lot of people who would otherwise have simply invested in markets have become 'angel investors'. Joining an investment club seems like a sensible idea for these investors, however they often lack the experience required to understand (or indeed empathise) with the entrepeneurs they meet.

<comment><USER4> Canada has similar programs. EBC (in British Columbia) provides a direct 30% refund on investment in eligible companies [1].

[1]: [http://www.pushormitchell.com/law-library/article/30-tax- ref...](http://www.pushormitchell.com/law-library/article/30-tax-refund- investors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Competitive pitch events seem like they would be detrimental to doing good business for both parties involved.

It's all just needless drama, as if multi million dollar investment deals aren't exciting enough. These kinds of things should be dealt with in a professional matter, especially given that I doubt most startups view their product as the equivalent of an unpurchased property on a Monopoly board during the tenth roll.

On an unrelated note, can someone please confirm my suspicions that the header image used is from Guildwars?

<comment><USER6> I know what you mean, it looks like a lot like one of the loading images used in GW2

I did a quick Google search though and found this [http://jcbarquet.com/](http://jcbarquet.com/) which makes since since they credit him in the bottom right of the picture

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just by having your product on Dragons Den you agree to giving them 5% of the company irrespective if there is an investment made or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? That's partly a surprise, given the public nature of the BBC, yet also not a surprise, given the value of the airtime one gets, even with a lame duck of an idea.

Got a link/reference for this 5%? If not, how did you learn of this?

<comment><USER8> I don't have a link but I'm pretty certain I've read that elsewhere as well from a pretty trustworthy source. It's not terribly unreasonable, but does seem a bit....predatory(?)</comment></comment></comment>