Where can I find the manual for my Mac OS?

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Level 1

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Where can I find the manual for my Mac OS?

ver. 10.7.3: 2.4 GHz core 2 Duo with 4 GB of DRAM.

I have three questions:

1. Where can I find the manual for my machine i.e. hardware manual and or consumer/connaisseur manual?

2. Does it have a zip media drive? I'm looking at the left side of the machine and I see small square shaped slot for a disk of this sort. I know this is a common type of media storage for cameras and would like to confirm that it is zip.

3. And while i'm at it, could you remind me of the uses of the two ports advancing towards the back of the computer next to the USB inputs.

PS: I'm also interested in any technical information concerning Apple hardware and if you could direct me to the appropriate forums I would appreciate it.

Thank you in advance.

Sincerely

Shawn

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on May 8, 2012 11:46 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

captfred

Level 7

26,422 points

May 8, 2012 12:04 PM in response to 0x0101

In the Menubar, click  > About this Mac > More information. Then click "support" on the right side. You can download your user manual here and it should answer your other questions.

Edit: added the step of More Information

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Answer 2

dominic23

Level 10

83,916 points

May 8, 2012 12:17 PM in response to 0x0101

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/macbook_pro_15inch_late_2011.pdf

Hope this helps.

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Answer 3

May 8, 2012 12:29 PM in response to 0x0101

You can always look up your specifications at http://support.apple.com/specs/

I'm not sure what you mean by ZIP media drive? A 2.4Ghz core 2 duo MBP would have an ExpressCard/34 slot. The only ZIP drives I know of are ancient things.

The ports on the left hand side, from back to front (for a 15" core 2 duo MBP):

power

ethernet

firewire 800 (will accomodate firewiree 400 devices with appropriate adapter, which are cheap).

mini-display port

USB

expresscard slot

mic in

headset out

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Answer 4

0x0101 Author

Level 1

0 points

May 8, 2012 11:27 PM in response to Michael Black

Hi Michael,

The question came up when I was checking out types of storage media at newegg.com. You've helped me to indentify that the slot next to the 2 USBs is an express card slot or a secure digital non-volatile memory card slot with a capacity ranging from 1MB to 2GB. But it is figuring out how to use tape zip media in the most efficacious manor that I am after. You must admit, $5 shipping and $25 for the media is very attractive considering they hold 800 to 1600 GB each. DVD +R DL i.e. double layer is not too bad at ~17 GB per disk. But that's alot of disks to burn if I want to back up by stuff at ~120GB.

tape zip media: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840999125

DVD +R DL ; see: double layer i.e. 'DL': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD%2BR_DL

Thanks for the help

Shawn

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Answer 5

May 9, 2012 7:28 AM in response to 0x0101

If I needed to backup 120Gb of stuff, I'd get a portable hard drive. You can get a 500Gb 2.5" portable hard drive for less than $100. Remember, along with the tapes, you need a proprietary drive, and proprietary software to read and write to it.

The problem with any tape solution is that tapes all use some sort of proprietary format for storage, so if the software/hardware ever disappears, you are stuck with a bunch of tapes you can no longer extract data from. Since tape is an old technology and steadily declining in use, the odds that in as little as a few years from now you may be unable to retrieive anything from those tapes is very high. I just would never recommend tape as a long term backup solution - IT closets are chock full of old tapes that they can no longer read due to deprecated hardware and/or software (I've dealt with that nightmare before - tapes where the drive dies, the vendor no longer makes it, and if still in business, their current stuff is not backwards compatible with their older tapes and storage or compression formats).

In terms of cost per Gb of storage, and being long term compatible, a hard drive is cheaper and more reliable. Of course, the essence for any long term archival strategy is redundancy anyway (never put all your eggs in one basket and expect them to last).

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Answer 6

0x0101 Author

Level 1

0 points

May 9, 2012 12:03 PM in response to Michael Black

Is there not an authentic company in the bunch? A company committed to ensuring long term compatability for the long term, abeit a cheap, and thereby generous solution to the mass data storage problem? I understand your woes of losing GB of data, but there must be a way to ensure long term stability. Not to upgrade the operating system and the software perhaps? Sure losses are taken but I could leave the task of reading this data to a computer from the early 2000s. I don't need the latest and greatest thing to read it and once transferred to the older device, it could then be transferred to the newer ones. What may be a software/hardware issue for a large corporation may be my profit. You have to admit... 800-1600GB is attractive. In addition, my intention is to quadruple my data storage rate by more than 1000%. I'm a coder and I need my space. But in another light, I will take your advice into consideration, as it is just in its own right, the irrelevant technology factor is not to be dismissed lightly. Although I cringe at having to pay $100 for an external hard-drive. It is the less risky solution.

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Answer 7

0x0101 Author

Level 1

0 points

May 9, 2012 12:35 PM in response to 0x0101

I will dubb the theme of this thread: the mass storage data problem and by problem I mean how can we store data in the most cost-efficient and efficacious manor possible if we can classify data storage strategies into two groups respectively: 1) the individual stragegy and 2) the corporate stragegy. The individual, we will say, is rational and seeks to store as much data as possible in the megabyte range, the gigabyte range and the terabyte range. How will he or the corporation, of conglomerate, large, mid-size or start-up size i.e. 2 - 200 people procede. Please feel free to enhance the dialog of this post in the framework of the corporate schema vs. individual and change the estimations, exp: 2 -200, to fit a realistic scenario of what i'm trying to evoke here.

I'll start of with

MB range = 4 GB Lexar standard USB bought at Dwain Reed (note: this is just a starting point to provoke dialog and don't intend this as a suggestion)

GB range = the portable hard drive at the suggestion of Michael Black of NC

TB range = tape media, at my suggestion that older devices could be used to read the data where an external hard-drive could be used as an intermediary component to transfer data to newer devices, say the portable hard-drive of Mr. Black and an internal-hard drive which is standard in an older machine. We will say that the labor/work required to remove either is irrelevant as our time is assumed to be worthless within reasonable bounds.

-Shawn

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Answer 8

May 9, 2012 12:52 PM in response to 0x0101

Honestly, even for home use, small RAIDs are not that uncommon, and online cloud storage is steadily gaining traction. On a per gigabyte basis, disc is pretty cheap and formats are stable over the long term (HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, Ext2/3 etc have all been around a very long time, while dozens of proprietary tape compression formats have come and gone over the same time). A home RAID or NAS is not exactly a rare thing these days. OWC sells a simple 2x2TB mirrored RAID for about $550.00 (or a 16TB RAID 5 for about $1900). Tape cannot even begin to compete, especially when you factor in that its merely an archival system at best, is slow (is so slow it cannot be considered a real-time backup/restore solution), must be spooled back off tape to disk just to uncompress and read the files.

Even for home TB solutions, I would still go with a disk based system (I have a 1 TB firewire 800 drive as one of my backup drives for my MBP).

Tape just is not routinely considered much anymore - it is slow, it requires proprietary hardware AND software and uses non-standard compression formats. It pretty much has nothing positive to offer anymore.

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Answer 9

0x0101 Author

Level 1

0 points

May 9, 2012 1:06 PM in response to Michael Black

This is an intriguing conversation. I'm curious. Does the film industry, ahem even that other film industry that no one can say they are completely familiar with store most of its data in the cloud and on hard-disks. They must have something much bigger than a raid!

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Answer 10

eww

Level 9

53,028 points

May 9, 2012 2:52 PM in response to 0x0101

Everything that is stored "in the cloud" today is actually stored on hard disks. All the data that Google, Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other mega data users and purveyors store is on hard disks. Tape is dead.

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Answer 11

May 9, 2012 4:36 PM in response to 0x0101

0x0101 wrote:

This is an intriguing conversation. I'm curious. Does the film industry, ahem even that other film industry that no one can say they are completely familiar with store most of its data in the cloud and on hard-disks. They must have something much bigger than a raid!

Why do you say that? There are RAID arrays and large SAN devices that have capacity in the hundreds of terabytes. Even many years ago NetApp supported large disc-based storage systems that were basically only limited in how many discs could be used by available physical space and power. Some of their current disc-based sytems scale to many petabytes.

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Answer 12

May 10, 2012 7:15 AM in response to 0x0101

Just a P.S. factoid.

One of the worlds largest data storage systems is IBM's system for CERN, which as of last year was up to something like 120PB, using over 200,000 conventional 1TB hard drives in a massive array and running IBMs own GPFS file system.

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Answer 13

Dakota

Level 3

970 points

May 10, 2012 8:38 AM in response to 0x0101

My MacBook came with a directory 'User Guides And Information' with User Guide +

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