USB 3.0 Sata Drive Dock with 1TB drive

Purchased from Newegg:
1. Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive and
2. Rosewill RX-DU300 2.5" & 3.5" USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking

Received it within 2 days. I'm going to use this between windows 7, linux and mac, so I had to figure out how to best partition and format the drive. I could've formated to FAT32 using GPARTED, but I opted to create two partitions, and format the first partition as ntfs, and the 2nd as ext2.

Formating to ntfs was done by connecting to windows 7 laptop. For the ext2 partition, I booted up the laptop using a Gparted Live CD, and was able to create and format the partition.

I now needed to test this with my windows 7 laptop. I had used ext2ifs at work, and tried to install that first. I was having some issue with the install not working with windows 7, and had to set it to win vista sp2, to get it installed. In the short time I had, I didn't figure out how to get it to work. I opted to then download ext2fsd, and had to set the compatibility to win vista sp2 to also get it installed. Once I was able to figure out how to start the ext2fsd service, I was able to recognize and use the ext2 partition from windows 7. I will test the USB 3.0 dock later with the mac and linux, and also try to get some performance benchmarks.

Mac OS X running using Vmware Player

On May 14th, 2011 I decided to experiment with running Mac OS X in a vm on my Dell XPS 15.

Following this video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DThspgJ-Sm8 ) it got me about 95% of the way there. I had to do some work on getting all the downloads mentioned. The toughest part was after the installation, the reset would go straight into a kernel panic within the vmware player. The change I needed to make was just prior to running the Mac OS X install, I also needed to select the "Legacy Kernel" as part of the install customization.

Update - May 15th, 2011
As I mentioned earlier, I did get 10.6.6 working using the "legacy kernel." I proceeded to get the audio working. To execute the audio package, I thought I needed to go through vmware tools, which "can't be accessed." From one of the blogs, it suggested to run the OS X update, and reinstall the vmware tools. Once I ran the update and restarted, I got the kernel panic back.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=255734&view=findpost&p=1683372

Update 2 - May 15th, 2011
I didn't want to go through the install process just again (probably did it 5x?). I downloaded the vm player boot loader:

http://www.sysprobs.com/install-update-snow-leopard-hazard-1064-vmware-player/comment-page-1#comment-8656



Update - May 27th, 2011
Upgraded to 10.6.7 of OS X. USB support is still flaky on this version of Vmware player, and the vmware tools isn't working. Install iLife, and iMovies doesn't work (complaining about having the proper graphics interface). iChat, iPhotoBooth, and the sound is working. This setup does hang about 1/3 rd of the time, mostly have to restart the laptop, sometimes able to restart the vmware player. I did find a comment on the internet that 6.5 of vmware workstation had USB working properly and 7 was still being worked through.

Reference:
Vmware Wiki