HP ProBook 4540S upgrade

It has been a while since I was doing some computer related work. Just today, the CPU which I ordered form my ProBook 4540S dropped in.

I bought the ProBook some years ago. It was equipped with an Intel Core i3 Sandy Bridge (HD3000), 4GB of RAM and a 320GB HDD.

It did not take long and I replace the HDD with a 1TB WD Black drive.

Some time ago, I upgraded to OS to OS-X 10.10 Yosemite. I did actually not write about this upgrade. It went very smoothly using clover as boot-manager. I can only recommend that route!
This upgrade got me to using the ProBook more often, so, I decided to add another 4GB of RAM.

Lately, I was using RawTherapee and the GIMP a lot. Image processing is really demanding on CPU-power, so, I finally decided to give the ProBook a real upgrade: a new CPU!

My choice fell onto an Intel Core i7-3612QM.

The Core i7-3612QM belongs to the Ivy Bridge generation of Intel CPUs, the most power efficient generation. It seems that the Ivy Bridge i7 has got the same power ratings as the Sandy Bridge i3.

For reason of the observation, that the battery seems to drain quicker, I am not sure about this. However, it also needs to be said that the laptop seems to stay much cooler, with no additional fan activity.

Beyond thermal and power considerations, the Ivy Bridge HD4000, contrary to Sandy Bridge, is genuinely supported by modern versions of OS-X.

All in all, quite some money went into the upgrades. Still I believe that my ProBook was a lot cheaper than a comparable MacBook Pro.

Yosemite or not?

Having had my share of failures in my experiments, I would like to add another one: OS-X Yosemite!

I tested the new OS-X on 2 of my Hackintoshs:

1. a Z77 i3 - which installed fine 
2. a Z87 xeon - the install failed

Let's start with the 2nd ... my Z87 Xeon E3 runs Mavericks perfectly!
When trying to install Yosemite, the entire thing fails. Yosemite was written half way, so I had to recover Mavericks from backups. No problem here...

The Z77 i3 did not object to the installation of OS-X Yosemite. However... The BIG deal about OS-X-10.10 was that any modern IOS device can connect to the OS-X computer.
Well, my iPad-mini could actually _not_ connect to the i3 running Yosemite. Neither through WiFi, not through Bluetooth.

So... what's the point?!

Yosemite does not install properly on hardware running Mavericks.
Even if Yosemite is installed, the functionality does not match the promises...

What's the point?!

I'll be running Mavericks for the time being.

Changing from NAS4free to FreeNAS

I am a great fan of NAS4Free. It houses my most precious data for a long time by now.
However, there is a problem with using TimeMachine with NAS4Free. Actually, I have no clue why...

Incidentally, I was playing with another distribution, quite similar to NAS4Free: FreeNAS. FreeNAS is a bit heavier than NAS4Free, although they share the same origin.
Unfortunately, FreeNAS is a tad to big to fit on the internal SSD of my Acer Easystore (Intel Atom based), which actually houses my precious data.

From another project, I had a box with an AMD FX-6100 processor, which was not doing a lot. So I decided to give it a shot, installed 4 HDDs and NAS4Free on a stick. To that time, I thought that my TimeMachine problem was originated in the lack of compute power of the humble Intel Atom. Well, I was wrong. Even 6 cores and 8GB RAM could not solve those problems.
However, the NAS with the AMD FX-6100 served perfectly in all other services.

My TM-backups were done, you will find that post on this blog, on a FreeNAS-based AMD-APU machine, which I called TimeVault. To the present day, this is a very reliable TimaCapsule subsitute.

However, I decided to give my bad-ass 6 core NAS a second chance concerning TimeMachine. So, I got myself an external 3TB HDD, to temporarily backup the data. It took for ages, with many failures, doing it via AFP and a regular Hackintosh. I discovered that using the Hackintosh, this backup was much faster, not failing at any stage, using NFS (which I had set up for my UNIX machines anyway). Lesson #1: use NFS even on a Mac/Hack!

Now, finally, today, I did the migration from NAS4Free to FreeNAS on the 6 core machine.
And this is was this post is all about!
Buying an HDD, backing up data and all that for just for the bin!
I booted a 1 year old CD version of FreeNAS and installed it.
As soon as the box was up, I could just use WebGui with "Storage" => "Auto Import Volume" to import my 4 ZFS formatted data disks. Everything was done automatically... the process even recognized my ZFS data pool settings! And of course, all my data was fine!

Finally I installed the most recent stable upgrade of FreeNAS.

Presently running it, TM finally seems to be happy backing up to the 6 core box.

Quick Tip: Calibrate Your Monitor!

If you are using your Hacktintosh to just check email once in a while, this post is not further importance to you. However, if the computer is used for any sort of visual work, such as processing of video or still photography, artwork or design, you may want to consider calibrating you screen.

Of course there is the relatively pricy option of screen calibrators which you connect via USB and all the magic happens.

As to Apple's OS-X, there is a calibration mode provided for free, which uses even more precious sensors, namely your very own eyes.
For using this tool, you want to open the "Displays" option in "System Preferences". Go to the "Color"-tab. Now you want to click on "Calibrate...", which will open another window. Be sure to check the "Expert mode" box! As of now, lean back (as the instructions will tell you) and follow the instructions!
My experience told me to do this exercise a couple of times in order to get the hang of the tool and a  precise calibration. Mind you, you are using parts of your very own body to calibrate an electronic device. Using your senses always involves learning.

Disable or Not Swap on Your M(H)ac(k)intosh

Why would you want to do that?! Well, simple, today, RAM does not cost a thing, 8GB or 16GB are plenty for most applications, and there still is the option to go to 32GB. Virtual memory, it seems, is not that important any longer.

Most of the recent Macintosh, or Hackintoshs respectively, have the operating system on an SSD, for quick boot-up times. I believe real Macintosh computers employ SSDs only nowadays, but I am not sure...
We all know, that the easiest way to wear down your SSD is, to use it as a swap (virtual memory) device.

Given that your computer is supplied with sufficient RAM for your tasks, you may want to try this:
http://wiki.summercode.com/how_to_disable_or_enable_swapping_in_mac_os_x
and disable swap all together.
Presently, with my most recent build (16GB), I am actually trying this.

Hackintosh computers usually employ a regular HDD for mass-storage (or scratch), next to the SSD boot drive. For those boxes, one may consider using the magnetic HDD for swapping. This is a bit more complicated, but still doable:

• boot your Hackintosh into Single user mode using "-s" (no quotation marks)
• mount your HDD, using something like (depending on your setup, disk1s2 is my HDD, mounted on the mount point /Volumes/HOME/):
  mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s2 /Volumes/HOME
• now lets make a hidden "vm"-directory:
  mkdir /Volumes/HOME/.vm
• link the new "vm" directory to the expected place:
  ln -s /var/vm /Volumes/HOME/.vm
  you may also link "/private" if you want:
  ln -s /private/var/vm /Volumes/HOME/.vm
• for good measures it created empty files (probably not necessary):
  touch /Volumes/HOME/.vm/swapfile0
  and
  touch /Volumes/HOME/.vm/swapfile1since those were the files found first...
• to enable swap, I entered:
  launchctl load -F /System/Library/LaunchDeamons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist

When you're done with that, you just want to make sure all data are written using the command sync. Now, just type reboot.

A from now, my system uses swap (virtual memory) on the magnetic disk, leaving the SSD alone.

Of course, running swap of the HDD might be possible w/o switching off swap in the first place. I have not tried this, but I am certain that (in Single User mode) creating the hidden directory first, copying the swapfiles to it, deleting the previous /var/vm location and finally linking the hidden directory to /var/vm will do the exact same thing.

Updated!

For good measures, and luck, Apple published the OS-X 10.9.2 update lately. Since I was installing the new machine, I did the update right away, no backups done.
A simple manual edit (vi is my friend) changed a line in
/Extra/smbios.plist
to
<string>MacPro6,1</string>
and resulted in the fact that "about this Mac" => "more info..." shows a black trash can.
Actually, I am happy with a result of this nature, although I still appreciate the option to add more hardware to my trash can.

A Whole New Dimension

So, the build is done, and I am actually quite happy with it!

Parts that made it into my new workstation so far:

• Gigabyte GA-Z87-HD3
• Intel Xeon E3-1240v3
• Noctua NH-D14
• 2 x 8GB Mushkin Stealth DDR3 (1600MHz)
• Crucial M500 240GB SSD
• Asus GT640 silent
• Fractal Design Define R4
• BeQuiet Pure Power L8 630W
• Seagate Barracuda 1TB
• TP-LINK WDN-4800
• Logitech K400r

The board allows me to add 2 more modules of RAM, with 16GB, I got plenty for the time being.
This is my first ever build using an SSD as a boot drive. And yes, this adds a new dimension, however, I expected a shorter boot time. When the system is up, starting applications from the SSD is quick and deserves 5 stars.

Home directories are on a regular hard drive. For convenience and the low price, I went for an SG Barracuda 1TB, nothing special though. I consider adding a Western Digital black drive to replace the SG 1TB, so that the SG will be available for internal backups/mirroring.

If it is not speed, what is the new dimension, you may want to ask... It is noise, in particular the lack thereof!
The entire build was focused on the lowest noise parts possible, not compromising at performance too much.
And so far, the result is very pleasing. A really silent system showing good performance.

Although I am happy with the performance of the passively cooled Asus GT640, I regret to not have invested additional €10 for getting the Intel Xeon E3-1245v3 with internal graphics.

OS-X 10.9.1 runs like a charm. The system boots right away, using "GraphicsEnabler=No".

Wanna build a Hackintosh yourself? I can only recommend the components mentioned above, with the consideration of the alternative CPU having the iGPU enabled.

Update May 9th 2015:
The system runs on Yosemite for quite a while now. Up to 10.10.2, the GT640 did a great job. No problems fooling 10.10.2 the computer was a MacPro6,1.

However, the card failed when I tried to update to 10.10.3.
So, I took the plunge and got myself a new graphics card, actively cooled actually:

• MSI GT740 (2GB)

To my surprise, this card is actually really quiet, something I was not expecting.
However, under 10.10.3, is seems that the MacPro6,1 identity does not work any longer. I changed the definition to iMac13,1, which works fine so far.

Update May 10th 2015:
Although the MSI was not as noisy as I feared, I gave the ASUS GT640 quiet another go. And, fair enough, with the right identity, i.e. iMac 13,1, it works perfectly.
 

Stuff Dropped In

Yep, I did it, I ordered some parts to build my new "production" rig with.
The Fractal Design R4 looks awesome!  It seem so big, but yet it is not...
Not much to say about the motherboard, CPU (E3-1240v3) or memory. Will pick up an after-market cooler tomorrow. Potentially the Noctua I was writing about earlier. Total overkill, however, quiet is king in this build.
Already I removed the optical drive from my present main rig (i5-3570K)... it will be more useful in the future build.

Small Change of the Plan

Building a higher end workstation, why actually not using an ATX-mobo in place of an mATX?
Right, the case would be a little larger.

So, the decision, concerning the mobo, is to go for a GA-Z87-HD3. The advantage, very obviously, is having a lot of expansion possibilities.

The idea of using Fractal Design's DEFINE mini hast to be ditched consequently. However, the "DEFINE mini" is just the smallest of the "DEFINE" silent computing cases. Here, the decision is to obtain a DEFINE R4. Since Apple decided "black" was the new "white" (cf. new Mac pro), the choice is obvious, in particular since the black DEFINE R4 looks the best of the bunch.

Plans for a new Build

note to myself: you want to keep those parts in mind for the next build

• Intel Xeon E3-1240 v3
• NVidia GT 640 (ASUS passive?)
• fractal design - DEFINE mini
• Noctua NH-D14
• Gigabyte GA-H87M-D3H

It should be a quiet PC able to run as a Hackintosh. More powerful than an i7-4770.

Pimping the Wimp a Mite

Yeah well, onboard HD2500 graphics did not really do it for me. Even with the tricks mentioned before, i.e. to watch youtube using Chrome, all together, it was a little sluggish at the end.

So, I decided to put the Wimp in another case, in order to allow for a graphics card to be installed.

A Linux PC, based on an AMD E350 APU, which I used rarely, lived in a Thermaltake Element Q case. Although this PC actually needed the PCI-E slot for a network card, I decided to take it apart anyways.

Now, the HackWimp lives in an Element Q.

Looking you a graphics card, I found a passively cooled ASUS GeForce 8400. This card, which worked for Mountain Lion, refused to work with Mavericks... something I observed with other versions of OS-X.

Next trial: an original NVIDIA GeForce 8400, which always did a great job. And yes, it did! But this card has got very noisy active cooling.

Last try, a GeForce 8400 of a different brand, which I recently used for other purposes. Actively cooled, somewhat noisy, but not too bad. This card played plain dead!

The decision was to exchange the cooling setups of the two actively cooled cards.

Now I am running a genuine NVIDIA GeForce 8400 with 256MB RAM and tolerable active cooling.
This card allow for 1080p video to be displayed full-screen, which the HackWimp was not able to do before.
The choice of browser stopped playing a role, I am hence back to firefox...

Added bonus: the Wimp can now be hooked up via VGA, allowing for monitors w/o HDMI or DVI.

YouTube on the Wimp

You can imagine that playing streaming video on a computer having a weak CPU, which also serves as a GPU, can create some head-scratch. And of course it did to me.

Here is what I could collect by doing some research on search engines and fora.

Add some support to the HD2500 (the GPU inside the G1610):
http://www.tonymacx86.com/graphics/95208-guide-intel-ivy-bridge-hd2500-full-resolution-qe-ci-10-8-3-a.html
That's the hard part.

However, with this working, youtube still wont play video on neither Safari nor Firefox, which both make use of Adobe's Flashplayer.

And here is the solution to the problem: Google's Chrome Browser. Chrome has got builtin support for streaming video. And indeed, with Chrome, the Wimp (G1610 Hackintosh) is able to play youtube content.
And yes, also in full-screen, but forget about full-screen again... not enough compute power in this computer!

Wi-Fi for the Wimp

In the last post, I wrote about a Hackintosh running on an upper end motherboard (Gigabyte Z77N-WiFi) with a lower end CPU (Intel Celeron G1610). To my surprise, despite a relatively long boot-time, the system is really usable.

However, the intention to set this computer up in a place rather remote from my ethernet, some option for wireless-LAN needed to be considered.

Of course, the Z77N-WiFi offers a MiniPCI Express slot, in which, conveniently enough, a WiFi/Bluetooth card is placed, hence the name of the board. Interestingly, only half the WiFi-card is natively supported by OS-X, namely the Bluetooth part.
There are a some MiniPCI-E modules available, which enjoy full native support, however, those don't offer BT!

In my i5-3570k box, I actually replaced the MiniPCI-E card, in order to arrive at native support. For Bluetooth on the other hand, I had to resort to a USB-device, which I had laying around anyway.

Now it fell all down to the question if I would order another MiniPCI-E WiFi card and a BT device, or, if I should hang on to the module supplied with the mobo and find a USB-solution for WiFi.

You feel it coming, I guess, yes, I had a USB-WiFi device in one of my drawers. The device is somewhat older, a Sweex LW303. And of course, there is not OS-X support for this adapter.
Or is there?

The LW303 employs a Ralink RT2870 chipset, which is good news! Some quick searching reveals that there is a OS-X 10.9 driver available for this particular chipset.
Have a look: http://store.bearextender.com/products/bearextender-1200-for-mac
And yes, the Beartender looks very promising itself!

The driver worked OOB with the LW303. Not sure if the numbers match up in terms of bandwidth, but this is what Mavericks believes to see:

802.11 n WLAN:

  Product ID:    0x0302
  Vendor ID:    0x177f
  Version:     1.01
  Serial Number:    1.0
  Speed:    Up to 480 Mb/sec
  Manufacturer:    Ralink
  Location ID:    0x14400000 / 1
  Current Available (mA):    500
  Current Required (mA):    450
  BSD Name:    en3

480 Mb/sec seems a bit fast for a device of which the manufacturer thinks it able to operate at 300 Mb/sec.

A minor detail to note: I put the adapter in a USB3 port, the one just below the PS2-port.

Independently of that mismatch, the USB WiFi-adapter works fine in this ultra low power PC!

MacWimp - Low Power Hackintosh

The cheapest Hackintosh I ever built!

Running Zentyal for my small private network was a great deal for some time. Nothing to be said against Zentyal, however, I might a used a different platform for running it on.
What platform? Well, that was a GA-Z77N-WiFi running an Intel Celeron G1610 dual core processor. The MoBo is a total overkill to a G1610, which cannot be overclocked, and so is a G1610 to a very small network "enterprise" server. Actually, the CPU was bored most of the time anyway.

So, is there any better use for the CPU and the MoBo?

Yep! It seems that folks have successfully installed OS-X on that particular platform. Although I never built the system for OS-X, now that it was unemployed for some time, it might as well serve as a simple Hackintosh workstation!

The hardware involved:

• Intel Celeron G1610
• GigaByte Z77N-WiFi
• Corsair 2x4GB DDR3 (1333MHz)
• Seagate Momentus 2.5" 160GB
• Cool Master Elite 100 
• Logitech K400r
• Philips 236V4

Actually, I had the HDD wafting about in my "junk box", it came from some computer, I can't even remember (honestly!).
The RAM I got for cheap from a superstore...

• You may see that the case actually wont allow for a graphics card, hence, the internal HD2500 GPU has to be used.

Not playing, I went using OS-X 10.9.1 straight away. Booting it, using "fail safe" (-x) worked OOB. However, after running MultiBeast 6.1, things were not working out so well. The system booted, but only with the "-x" option.
At the end, I got this weakling to run with information you can find on google searching for "G1610 HD2500 GraphicsEnabler IGPEnabler Hackintosh".

Finally, I got the whole thing booting regularly with

• Internal Graphics Memory set to 32MB (bios)
• inserted a device properties entry into /Extra/org.Chameleon.boot.plist
• removed AppleIntelHD4000Graphics.kext from /System/Libraby/Extensions
• computer type set to MacMini6,2

Since I had to play a little to get thing running, there may be some more parameters, which I lost track of, to get the things flowing.

To make live easy to you, this is the content of my /Extra/org.chameleon.Boot.plist:
        <key>EthernetBuiltIn</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>GraphicsEnabler</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>IGPEnabler</key>
        <string>No</string>
        <key>Kernel</key>
        <string>mach_kernel</string>
        <key>Kernel Flags</key>
        <string> -v</string>
        <key>Legacy Logo</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>Timeout</key>
        <string>2</string>
        <key>GenerateCStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>GeneratePStates</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>UseKernelCache</key>
        <string>Yes</string>
        <key>Graphics Mode</key>
        <string>"1920x1080x32"</string>
        <key>device-properties</key>  <string>7f0000000100000001000000730000000200000002010c00d041030a000000000101060000027fff04002c0000004100410050004c002c00690067002d0070006c006100740066006f0072006d002d00690064000000080000000b006601140000006800640061002d0067006600780000000d0000006f6e626f6172642d31</string>

So far, I am happy with the behavior of the box. Actually, TM backup to my server just went through fine.

HP ProBook 4540s

Guess why I bought this particular model?

Of course I like keyboard, very Apple-like, and the mat screen and further the ease of accessing the HDD and other stuff. However, the main motivator was, that it was the successor of the ProBook 4530s, which, allegedly, is the best laptop computer to be OS-Xed.
I tried the traditional route, i.e. SnowLeopard DVD, and the further steps. I got as far as Lion, and than things stopped working out. Finally, I sort of gave up, installed a linux on the laptop and was happy!

Just lately, something told me go give it a try again. Potentially it was the availability of the latest Probook installer 6.1.11, which motivated the second attempt.
All data securely put on an external disk, I tried my luck. Now, my HP Probook 4540s (Sandy Bridge) is happily running OS-X 10.8.5. Even the dared first TM-backup went straight through.

You may ask, why I am not trying to install Mavericks (OS-X 10.9.1) on the laptop. Well, first of all, I like Mountain Lion in a way. And yes, I was tempted by the fact that 10.9.x seems to incorporate power-handling more deeply. Hence, I tried to boot 10.9.1, but it failed in the first attempt... so I just decided to leave things as they were.

We'll see what the future has in house for the last laptop member of the Sandy Bridge family.

BTW, in order to get WiFi, I exchanged the laptops WiFi-card to one that is supported by OS-X genuinely. This set me back by about €8.-

When I bought it, the ProBook 4540s cost me about €600,- and came with MS Virus7. I replaced the 320GB HDD with a 1TB WD blue (which was about another €100.- at the time).

All in all, I am really glad to have bought this computer. It served me fine under Linux and it seems to be doing a great job with OS-X right now.

Tablet on a Hackintosh

The good old times, where it was clear what was a tablet, when speaking about computers. Today, there is a good confusion of what a tablet is. Well, this post is not about iOS or Android devices, this is about the input device called a tablet, or graphics tablet to be precise.

There was a certain hype, well before touch-screens, to use tablets in particular in drawing applications and CAD. There was a time, when those things were really cheap. On a windows PC, or Linux respectively, the cheap tablets work just fine OOB, w/o any additional worries.

However, the world is different on a Mac. Those things are not just working on a Mac at all. Still, there is hope!
Have a look at hyperpen-for-apple. This solved it all for me.

There are some issues however...
- First of all, the zip-file would not be unzipped by the Archive-tool. "unzip" (in a terminal window) works fine, however it spills the content in the directory you are calling unzip from.
- Secondly, whenever you want to use you tablet, you have to call the "hyperpenDaemon" manually; remember to execute this program indicating your very own screen resolution. I wrote a tiny shell script, so that I do not have to remember the parameters.

Up to now, I have not yet started using my tablet. The idea was to use it with the GIMP, post-processing my photos (cf. my photo-blog).

Sleep?

That was kinda interesting... On my Hackintosh, traditionally, sleep never worked. When I am writing "sleep" here, I mean the sleep mode of the computer that puts the workstation into standby after a while of inactivity. Manual sleep, in like putting the computer into sleep manually, never has been an issue, neither has been waking the computer up again.

Carelessly, since I am not used to (automatic) sleep on my Hackintosh, I had a long job running over night, I thought. Getting into my study in the morning, I realized that my computer was actually not "ON". No big deal, maybe I switched it off, I thought in the morning confusion of my slowly awaking brain. But no, hitting the power button, the thing came to life, just to continue what I wanted it to do all night (only that it took all day now).
It seems that some of the updates of OS X 10.9 brought OS X even closer to the Hackintosh hardware I am using (GB Z77N-WiFi & i5-3570K).

At the end of the day, I hate that my over-night job did not run over night, however, I am pleased with the fact that the last missing function, auto-sleep that is, is now available to me.

Reducing the Hack

Not doing so much other than email, youtube and some primitive photo and video editing, I decided it was time to reduce the power consumed by the Hack.
The first move was to remove the 2GB GT610, which is a very nice graphics card, however, I am not sure if my system profited from this card in any way.
The second step was to replace the USB studio monitors by regular active PC speakers. The incentive of doing that is that those speakers do not draw the amount of current required to be linear (the studio monitors got quite warm over time) and additionally, the PC speakers are not influencing USB, i.e. not waking up the Hack when switched off.

Overclocking long term experience

To be frank, I am no gamer. In my life, there is no enhanced need of a high performance, super fast machine. However, I wish to have a PC, let's call it workstation, which is responsive at average use.

In a previous post, I took overclocking my hackintosh to the extreme, i.e. the last point in which the workstation still was able to properly boot and run cinebench. Those settings were reached by slowly bringing up all the clocks during one session. Meaning, at the beginning everything was cold, but during tempering, the system was at an upper operation temperature.
The same settings, which worked nicely with a warm system, cause the workstation to cease up when I tried to boot it after cooling down, i.e. the next day. This 5.x GHz clock was a bit too much for my humble Core i5-3570k when cold. Probably drawing too much DC-power.

For daily business, I backed off from those super intense setting, playing it safe with the following parameters:

• basic CPU clock speed: 4.4GHz
• one core active: 4.8GHz
• two cores active: 4.7GHz
• three cores active: 4.6GHz
• four cores active: 4.5GHz

In addition the RAM is overclocked from 1.6GHz (stock) to 1.8GHz.

Compared to the standard settings 3.4GHz base clock speed, with unlocked speeds up to 3.8GHz, the workstation is much snappier now.
The temperatures are moderate, no increase worth to be mentioned.
Some experimentation took place with the DDR3 clock speed. When going too high, the computer would not boot up. However, for the rest, I am not sure if overclocking adds anything to the performance. Also, overclocked or not, the temperature of those ginormous DDR3 heat sinks did not change at all. Anyways I am not sure why industry presently presents us with those huge heat sinks, or even water cooling, for DDR3-RAM... but this is another topic all together.

DIY Time Vault (Time Capsule clone)

Apple's Time Machine is a nice piece of software, however, it also is know for failing regularly on both, Macintoshs and Hackintoshs.
Of course one would expect that the product works perfectly on its intended hardware, leaving the more underground Hackintoshs behind, however, it doesn't!

=> Wanna skip the motivational part? Just scroll to the Recommendation section.

So, what is the problem?
In pursue to solve the mystery, I experimented with various different file servers and server OS serving various different Hackintosh, since this is what is at my proposal.
At the beginning, the results seem inconclusive, however, I have the impression that by now, I got closer to the problem's solution.


The Servers

Let's have a closer look at the 3 file servers I was using during testing.

1. Low Power: Intel Atom single core, running NAS4Free, 4 HDD @ RAID-Z1
2. Moderate Power: AMD E-350 dual core, running FreeNAS, 2 HDD @ RAID-Z (mirror)
3. Moderate Power: AMD E-350 dual core, running FreeNAS, 2 HDD @ RAID-Z (stripe)
4. High Power: AMD FX-6100 six core, running NAS4Free, 4HDD @ RAID-Z1

Workstations

1. Core i5-3570K, Z77, overclocked, 8GB
2. Core i3-3225, H77, 8GB

Network

Everything is connected by Gigabit-Ethernet.

 
Experience

When one does encounter problems with Time Machine, usually, the workstation just freezes up. Maybe the mouse pointer will still react, but that's about it. During TM backups, the workstations seem to freeze up rather often, in particular when doing a fresh, first or initial backup, covering a large amount of data.

The Core i5-3570K struggled a bit in the beginning during writing backups to the Atom system. However, at some stage, the initial backup was successful, and backing up this particular workstation on the Atom server never had been a problem again.
The same workstation had no problems to store backups on any of the other server setups at any given time.

With the Core i3-3225, the experience was totally different. After many unsuccessful attempts, a backups was created successfully once on the Atom NAS. Incremental backups were OK, until a major change on the disk's data structure was introduced and backups failed ever since.
The same workstation failed to backup successfully on the AMD FX-6100, even when being the only client to that system. Even when running the FX-6100 at max specs, backups were still failing and the workstation was found in an oblivious state.
On the positive, backups to the AMD E-350 with a RAID-Z in stripe was immediately successful. This sort of backup-storage translates into the non-ZFS world as RAID-0, which is really fast, but not redundant (one disk goes bang and the data is gone). This server config gave some hope and also input to understand the TM-problem.
Now at the last option to discuss, the E-350 FreeNAS box was configured to RAID-Z(mirror), which is equivalent to RAID-1, i.e. mirroring disks. Such a config is somewhat slower than striped arrays, however, it give redundancy and therefore is a better safe-heaven for valuable data. Now, how did this perform as a TM backup server (Time Capsule)? Well, mixed results here! The backups stalled again, when the other workstation accessed the server during backup. However, the TM backup succeeded while the other workstation was totally disconnected from the file server.


Conclusions

When reflecting on the results, it seems that Apple's Time Machine needs a very prompt response from the file server (or Time Capsule, for good measures). However, there seems to be this other factor, being the processor (clock) of your OS-X host. The Core i5-3570K (3.4GHz + turbo) hardly ever had a problem to backup all it's data, while the Core i3-3225 (3.3GHz) had a hard time doing so.
All in all, I think, Time Machine is very much dependent on a quick reaction of the file server. Still I do not understand why the fastest machine, the AMD FX-6100, failed. However, I discovered, that in this particular FX-6100 setup, there might be a problem with the Gigabit-Ethernet.


Recommendation

When building a Time Capsule clone, the following can be done.
With an AMD E-350 dual core and a 1, 2 or 3TB drive, a fully functional Time Capsule clone can be built when running FreeNAS.
In the case that you wish to protect your valuable backups/data more reliably, you may want to consider using a file sever with mirrored disks. If one disk fails, the other still holds all the data. I figure that this is more secure than using Apple's Time Capsule, which employs one disk only.
Therefore, my personal recommendation is to build a relatively low power AMD E-350 system as a Time Capsule clone, running FreeNAS with 2 mirrored disks. I would call this a Time Vault.
Configuration of the FreeNAS-OS to operate as a server for Time Machine backups is pretty simple. In a usual way, set up your data storage structure, than add a share for AFP and set the "disk discovery" mode of said share to "Time Machine" and you're good to go.