Hard Disk Drive Replacement Options

I don't use RAID, but fooling around with Disk Utility on El Capitan, it now appears that's been removed as well.

Are there other ways to bring all this removed stuff back via, maybe a key-sequence (like control-click, command-click, etc) and it's just not documented, or is this stuff really gone for good?

RAID is gone from the GUI.

I would wager it is because too many "regular folks" got themselves in too much trouble, e.g. striped RAIDs that were not actually faster but sure did fall apart on them and oh, no Backups.

All the underlying Terminal commands are still there. Now if you want it, you have to be serious enough to use terminal to get it. By the way, if you have an older system, you could create it in an older system and carry it forward.

Apple should consider allowing software to be installed at different user levels. I suspect that some of these limitations are done to protect less knowledgable users from messing things up, but others are just getting frustrated. A perfect example is my sister. She's a school teacher with a MacBook Pro Retina using an SSD. I asked her if her system had an SSD or HDD in it when she bought it because I was uncertain which model she had, and she had no idea. I asked her if her firewall was enabled, and once again, she had no clue. I asked her if her router had a firewall built in, and once again, no clue.

I'm a member of ACN (https://consultants.apple.com/us/) and a fair number of people I deal with are what are typically called "power users." They know what RAID is, they know how to configure it, they know everything about their systems, or at least most that's feasible realistically, and they typically have what I'd call advanced, or at least more advanced knowledge. These people are being frustrated by some of the limitations being imposed by the newer releases of OS X. SIP, in particular, is a problem. Although easily eliminated, it's just seen by these customers as yet another barrier to getting their systems to work the way they want them to.

For example, one of my customers had a device driver installed for a camera interface. It worked flawlessly until El Capitan came along and suddenly the device driver wasn't working. The end result was for him to go on a web search and waste a fair amount of time hunting down information about the system changes. Disabling SIP fixed the problem, at least temporarily, but it still took him hours of his own time to find out why the problem existed. It's still a question whether or not the manufacturer will modify their code to conform to SIP standards. Like it or not, Apple is still only a fraction of the personal computer market. They don't dominate it, but they act like they think they do.

As I understand it, Microsoft offers various user levels for software installation I don't know if it's true or not because I haven't used Windows since 2004, and even back then using it was a scarcity. Implementing different user levels would be a really good idea IMHO because it would please everyone. The typical computer user these days is, IMHO, more likely to be a power user than someone using an iPhone or an iPad as their primary device. The system I'm using right now has 3 monitors attached to it, and there's no way I could do the same kind of work I do on an iPad or an iPhone.

I'll get off my soapbox now. Cheers! 😉

Another option is to stick with another older OS X version where these problems don't exist. 😉

MrWilliams201 wrote:

You can say that again. The vast majority of security problems occur when someone does something stupid like opening up a link claiming that if you don't download their "Keeper" (get my drift?) their computer's going to 'splode on them any minute or literally giving their personal information and/or passwords away to someone else. Apple would be better off training people or at least giving them an option to be trained so they don't do these things. There's no reason the rest of us have to keep paying the price for the actions of non-thinking people.

Very elitist don't you think,

Thank you for your opinion, and for the record I couldn't disagree more.

I can understand both opinions. On the one hand, people really ought to have enough common sense to know better than to give out information because some web site popped up and told them their computer was infected with a virus or needs to be cleaned, or whatever, but on the other hand people with experience that are new to Mac's may be confused by some of the more advanced aspects of tools and their use.

That said, what I don't like is the elimination of features that were useful, and for all practical purposes, harmless. Here are a few that come to mind:

• The elimination of Expose. Although sort of replaced, its replacement is inferior.
• The elimination of the icon that allows you to access screen preferences from the menu bar. This is important for people that are doing graphics work.
• The elimination of the spinning backup icon that made it clear a backup was going on.
• On El Capitan, the apparently secret option to do advanced display configuration. It's still available, but only after clicking on the "configure" option with the "option" key held down.
• The use of thin fonts vs. what was used in previous versions.

My eye sight isn't 20/20, but I'm not blind either. I have no problem seeing anything in the "old" OS styles (Mavericks and earlier) but I find myself actually needing reading glasses to see El Capitan and Yosemite. This is ridiculous. This is bad design! Failing to accommodate people with what are basically minor vision problems is preposterous. Why eliminate useful features like Expose and the spinning backup icon in the menu bar, the display configuration access icon that was previously available…I just don't get it. I don't even see how these things could daze and confuse novices. I just don't get it. What are they thinking?????

MrWilliams201 wrote:

You guys seem to forget that little kids also use computers.

That might explain the appearance of the "new" user interface. 😁

I prefer Mavericks myself. I have an El Capitan partition and I used to have a Yosemite partition, but I use Mavericks as my base.

To update my last post, I swapped an OEM drive on a MacBook with a non-OEM drive. SMART parameters were fully reported for the OEM drive but all it would say for the non-OEM drive was "verified," so maybe the actual type of the drive has something to do with more extensive reporting.

Was that using El Capitan or an older OS?

Sorry about that. I was using a Mountain Lion system to do that. I've never seen anything but "Verified" come up using El Capitan.