Chris Anderson

iPhone OS 4.0 and multiple user accounts

After sharing one iPad amongst my coworkers for two days now, I’d bet money that Thursday’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement will bring multiple user accounts to the iPad (and possibly the iPhone). The iPad is too pricey for Apple to reasonably expect every person in a household to own one (though I’m sure they can dream). But because it’s so portable, it’s ridiculously easy to pass from person to person and thus makes multiple user accounts needed, much more than they are on an iPhone. The kids can have the user account with the games, while the parents can have the user account with the news apps (and, of course, the games). Coupled with iTunes content eventually hosted in the cloud (from Apple’s Lala purchase) each user account could directly access the entirety of their individual content without worrying about managing manual iTunes syncs.

With apps and iTunes content currently tied to a single iTunes account, it’s difficult to allow multiple people to purchase content on host it on the same iPad. If I want to buy and read a book on a coworker’s iPad, I would have to login as them on the device, which can mess up syncing and other app settings. Or I’d need to ask them to buy it, pay them in cash, but realize that the book will be forever tied to their iTunes account, not mine.

A user account system could even sync to individual iTunes accounts on a computer. The admin on the device could set how much space each user is allocated, and iTunes would fill each account to the allotted space.

In practice, I think it would be remarkably easy to implement a multi-user system on an iPad. You could tap your user account on the lock screen, enter your password, and view your own person home screen. You’d be able to log out, or the iPad could prompt a user to re-login after a certain time period.

I’m not sure if such a system would be quite as useful on an iPhone or iPod Touch, but if Apple would implement it on an iPad, I’m sure it could easily carry over. I think multiple user accounts on an iPad would be a HUGE feature and would make managing a single iPad much more convenient among households and businesses. Sounds exciting to me!

Software RAID and a Mac Pro

So today, I checked one more item off of my geek to-do list - set up a software RAID on my Mac Pro. I’ve always been curious about RAIDs, but never really had the motivation or multiple drives lying around to try one out. But, with my new Mac Pro, I’ve been obsessed with cramming every single iota of speed out of the new machine.

Previously, I had been rocking two terabyte drives (one for backup) with a 500GB drive for scratch. Now, with my cheap and handy new eSATA extender cable, I plugged in another 500GB external drive with an eSATA cable, giving me a total of two 1TB drives, and two 500GB drives. I’ve been interested in RAID 0, which is the striped variety. It stripes data across multiple drives for maximum performance, with the unfortunate caveat of losing all your data across those drives if any single drive fails. Now, because that external drive is plugged in via a eSATA cable and not firewire or USB, I can do that!

Setting up the RAID itself couldn’t be easier. Once I cleared the data off both disks, I opened Disk Utility, selected a hard drive in the left column, and clicked the RAID tab. Then, you simply drag the two drives you want to put into the RAID set to the list, select the type of RAID, name it, and click create! About a minute later, my new RAID drive appeared on my desktop, completely masking the fact that it was made up with two drives. My geek cred takes a hit there, as I really expected the process to be much more complicated.

My incredibly unscientific speed test seemed to prove that it really was faster. Copying a 5GB file from one normal drive to another took about 1 minute and 30 seconds, while copying the file to the RAID took about 45 seconds.

I’m going to use the RAID for scratch purposes, but I’m considering moving my entire system setup to it, and then Time Machining the RAID with one of the terabyte drives. That still leaves a leftover terabyte of storage, so it’s really not the best option long term. My best option would to get another terabyte and the RAID card and set up a RAID 5, giving my nearly as good as performance as a RAID 0 setup with some redundancy as well.

So for now, it will just sit there and offer some scratch storage until I finally figure out exactly what to do with it!