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FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance
peterdaly writes "As a proud new owner of a Mac mini, I quickly discovered the internal hard drive performance was so pathetic compared to what I was used to that I needed to do something about it ... preferably on the cheap. I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC. My mini got about a 75 percent disk performance increase for about $50 (or $100 if you need a drive). Here is a benchmark of before and after as well as information about my research and upgrade. If you already have at least 512MB RAM, this may be the best performance bang for your buck if you're looking for your mini to be faster and more responsive."
Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure. But many of the FireWire enclosures out there are what I would call, well, damned ugly. And huge. Way more huge than they need to be. And way too ugly and clunky to go with a computer like the Mac mini, unless you bought it completely for price and could care less about appearances.
Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):
http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp
a year ago, we stuck with hp while deciding upon a new standard laptop as the nc6000's had 5400 rpm drives vs a couple ibm units we were evaluating which had 4200rpm's. I wonder if anyone could ever decommoditize themselves as a pc maker by promising to sell quicker machines at a minor price premium - how much more would it cost to install 512MB and a 7200rpm drive instead of 256MB and 5400rpm?
ostiguy
try out one of those wiebetech drivedocks, they attach directly to your hard drive and arent enclosed by an ugly case.
You buy a system with a 4500 RPM drive, and you're surprised that an external FW 5400 or 7200 RPM drive performs better? Furrfu ...
Next on slashdot: a new and exciting way to suck eggs.
If you're in the crowd that would be bothered by a slow HDD, then I'd expect you to understand the implications of the mini's specs. I'm aware of this, yet bought a mini anyway, and it's chugging along fine for my needs, without any external storage.
The form factor sold the machine for me - I don't want to go adding an external drive to the machine, even for a performance boost. I knew I wouldn't be playing Unreal Tournament 2k4 or DooM3 on the machine, I bought it to have a small form factor desktop in addition to my laptop.
That said, the findings of improved speed with an external firewire drive is hardly surprising. Laptop hard drives (which the Mini uses) are notoriously slow, and if you're one of those who got a 4200 RPM drive with their Mini it's even worse than normal.
Still, nifty to know it works.
I'm curious though - has anyone replaced their mini's hard drive with a higher RPM laptop drive? Did that help matters much? I wouldn't mind going for a speed upgrade if I can keep the sleek, tiny form factor =)
-Amich
Can one actually run the OS off the Firewire hard drive?
...and no vested interest of any kind in anything relating to it, and didn't submit the story.
But thanks for your concern!
Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.
Soccer Goal Plans
It seems that to make the mini even worth using is to spend lots of money on upgrades.
If I recall correctly, the drive inside the Mac Mini is a laptop (2.5") drive. Those aren't really known for great performance. I'd not be surprised if it's the same kind of drive they put in Powerbooks (a 4500RPM).
So... basically this article is saying that fast drives are faster than slow drives. Heck, if I want to do anything intensive on my Powerbook (like DV capture or heck, use GarageBand), I need to use an external firewire drive.
Maybe I should write an article about how my Powerbook is faster with a Firewire drive, too!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I wonder if people are making firewire cases that are the same dimensions as the Mac Mini, so you could stack them neatly. I think would be an obvious product, but I haven't seen any yet.
I use a 120 GB Simpletech USB 2.0 drive as my capture/video editing repository and it works smashingly well. One time I forgot about saving the project to the Powerbook drive and was wondering why in heck iMovie HD was dropping frames and discovered I was using the internal drive. The USB 2.0 drive performs WAY better.
Gorkman
Thanks for the info. I'm about to do an upgrade to our office and wanted to get rid of our clunky G3 and G4 towers in lieu of some mini Macs. It's good to know that we should invest a few FW400 drives.
Check ... oh... two stories ago.
Idiot.
here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with Mac Mini hard drive performance? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac Mini for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Safari will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even SubEthaEdit is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on my Mac Mini, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac Mini that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Mac Mini's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Mac Mini is a superior machine.
Mac Mini addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac Mini over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I thought all the minis had 5400 RPM drives from the factory, right?
wrong catagory and as far as the topic , everyone knows that 2.5" hard drives are not as fast as there desktop counterparts. unless you put a 7200 rpm drive in your mini , which would generate too much heat. even then it would be twice as expensive.
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
I mean, if you're adding a seperate external enclosure, it kind of defeats the main point of the Mini doesn't it?
This just in..
Mac user upgrades slow standard hard drive to a faster one and then gets better performance. A PC user was overheard saying "no shit".
I bought the mini for the price and form factor with the plan to upgrade it for performance. Adding RAM helped a lot with the pin-wheel-o'-death, but I haven't gotten to the HD upgrade yet. And, I haven't been watching the HR market lately.
What's good in the 2.5", 5400-7200RPM 80GB+/- market now? I'm looking to avoid the scenerio where a crappy drive fails in the 2nd year of the warrenty and you just have to decide to get the next one bigger rather than do the warrenty repair.
If you really want a performance boost, don't use a mac, let alone a mac mini. There are very few benchmarks, real or synthetic, that a mac comes even close to a PC. Apple always uses low performance parts (such as a slow hard drive) in it's hardware, and overcharges those who purchase it. Apple tries to make their hardware look like it's great because of a flashy number such as "1 GB of RAM," but it's PC133, or "100 GB Hard Disk," but only 4200 rpm with 50 ms seek time. I've pointed out the hardware problems many times to those thinking apple is a top performer or economical in price. Just find a PC with the same or better hardware and look at the price comparison. The PC performs better in most applications as well. The only good part about a mac is the user friendliness. Don't confuse that with performance.
Here it is: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/16/ 2340245&tid=179&tid=164
It's just not on the front page.
seems to be the new trend:
- create a lousy article
- put some goooogle ads
- post on slashdot
- ?
- PROFIT
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently. Most of them involve either major, warranty-voiding modifications to the chassis, or as is the case here, ugly external peripherals that negate the main attraction of the Mini, its external appearance.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs. It has one DIMM slot, a relatively slow CPU, and a notebook hard drive -- if thats not what you want, you should look for something else rather than expecting the rest of the world to salute your cleverness in partially addressing its shortcomings. If you don't really need a Mac, you can put together a PC for under $500 with a real hard drive and much better expandability. If you want a $500 computer to run OS X on, you can get a used G4 with specifications similar to a Mini, except again with useful internal expansion capacity. And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I upgraded my GF4 MX400 to a 9800XT and got 200% performance increase. I submitted the story and my links which had benchmarks to show the increase, my story was rejected. I guess upgrading a slow part to a faster part in the Mini seems so much more sexy then upgrading a PC.
Funniest part of the the article, dude pulled out something he had pitched in his closet and it is faster then the drive in his brand new machine. Half the Mac diehards rate that as insightful, the other half make excuses and try to justify why the standard Mini drive is so slow.
from Feb 4th 2005
REVIEW: Mac mini -- internal and external hard drive tests
http://www.barefeats.com/mini01c.html
good analysis w/ lotsa pretty graphs
There's some talk that Apple will abandon FireWire for cabled peripherals, in favor of USB. But, with such high performance, is it a viable CPU bus? Maybe allowing better expandability of all devices, including multiprocessors?
--
make install -not war
Not owning a Mac Mini, I want to know, why didn't he just replace the internal crappy drive with the 7200 RPM Hitachi? The Hitachi is a 2.5" laptop drive. Won't it fit?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The real crime here is that Apple would have even shipped a computer with a 4200rpm drive.
:)
Yes I understand the slight cost difference and the slight possibility of heat difference, but a 4200rpm Drive? Give me a Break; it is almost 3 generations old in technology.
It is hard to even buy a laptop drive that is not at least 5400rpm anymore, and the 7200rpm and upcoming 10000rpm drives equal desktop hard drive performance.
They saved what, maybe $10-25 on the computer by using the 4200rpm drive, and yet I would imagine almost every user would rather pay the extra money to have a computer with a hard drive with 'normal' performance.
How is this innovative or cutting edge, when the technology they are shoving at Mac users, and first time Mac buyers that are not technical was top of line 5 years ago?
Apple can do SO much better than this, and we need to remind Apple that if they want to be the innovators and 'technology' leaders they can't get away with giving people sub quality performance and outdated technology.
I know a lot of people here love Apple and their Macs, but there are times when you need to tell Apple what you think and PUSH them to DO the right things and PUSH them to provide truly the best technology they can.
(In. example, you still can't buy a Mac Laptop with a high resolution LCD Screen, you still can't buy a Mac with graphics that are even in same class as top of the line PC graphics cards, The G5 is a great CPU, but even OSX (yes even Tiger) does not fully even utilize the features of this CPU. Tiger isn't' even a real 64bit OS, and should be (apple controls all the hardware, this should be easier for them than Microsoft and yet Microsoft is the one with a real 64bit OS for consumers. There are numerous other issues that truly bother me when people tell me they are the 'technology leader when it comes to graphic design or imaging' - technically the hardware falls short of what is available to the PC world.
One other note on the G5, if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz, why can't Apple do this in a desktop system and be a technology leader?
Ironic that the hard hitting G5 based Tri-core CPU from IBM is running Windows NT and Direct X for gaming and will be sold for playing Games.
Ok, I got off a bit on an Apple Rant, but darn it I used to love Apple back in the late 80s, and they keep disappointing me and disappointing me. I had so hoped OSX would be the saving factor for what I had expected from Apple, yet it is still catching up to Microsoft and Open Source OSes in a lot of ways and Apple still is NOT providing the cutting edge hardware that they 'market' that they are.
Apple fans, don't just accept what Apple gives you is always great, question it, compare it to the PC world, and if it isn't truly the level you expect from Apple, TELL THEM. Maybe some good user feedback will push Apple a bit more.
Take Care all... and sorry about the long rant.
I don't consider my clamshell iBook G3 333 or my PowerMac G4 Dual-533, or my iMac G3 400 MHz to be recent. All of them boot from firewire. Indeed the only firewire Mac that doesn't boot from firewire is the very first one: the blue & white PowerMac G3 tower. If you're looking for a Mac on the cheap, my advice is that you take a pass on any Blue & White - it isn't worth any price IMHO, and not just due to the non-booting firewire.
--- What?
Ok this is it, I am going for the iMac G5, 64 bit and I don't have to buy the wireless and the 100$ or so for the firewire disk. Etc...
NO longer will apple sell me cheap stuff
Now let me auction my kidneys for that iMac
I'll be flamed by die hard Mac zealots, but have to point that out: while the Mini is pretty unusable with 256MB under OSX it literally screams under Linux. ./configure time or video will get corrupt.
Debian installs just fine; some tweaking and a small patch may be needed to get X and audio to work properly (kernel 2.6.12 should already contain the audio patch) but after an evening you'll end up with a rock solid system that no Mini-Itx can match when it comes to price and power consumption.
Mine is a great cool and quiet DVD-DivX-Mp3-Photo player/viewer built on top of Debian Sid + gdm (for automatic login) + Ratpoison minimalistic WM + Freevo + Mplayer.
Getting Freevo to run was the hardest task since I had to tweak here and there and resolve manually some dependencies. Mplayer works like a charm, but if you compile it from source disable the (still buggy) Altivec optimization at
"My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times"
Ah, that's your problem. I was just in a local Apple store checking out the Mac mini, and the real models are at least 4x that speed, starting at 1.25 GHz. Caveat emptor: don't buy Mac minis on the street corner from guys in trenchcoats. By the way, are you running Windows on that 486/66 with 8 MB? You must have really optimized the heck out of it. I took the processor out of a wristwatch, put Linux on it, and it's faster than a Dual AMD64 with 4 GB RAM running Windows XP. Go figure. I must be doing something wrong.
This is a very odd post, did you just pull it off of weird nj a wiki something? Interesting info and Greystone sound like a cool place to visit. But why post it here?
=1000101
Spend the extra money on RAM instead, the cacheing will more then fix the drive RPM issue.
;)
Like any computer, once you run the apps once, they load near instantly.
And if you're doing heavy file serving, well... that's not what a mini is for now is it
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
This is like putting an after market "cherry bomb" muffler on a Toyota Prius.
...um, I assume he meant 175%? "Wow, check it out! I can spend money and make it go slower!"
I know it's a troll, but for the record: 17 MB copy, 3 seconds...
internal marble drop sounding 2.5" HDD.
Can I get a "duh"?
Sheesh.. It's amazing what counts as news these days on Slashdot..
Compared to OS9, X's accessing our server is like slogging through mud, I can tell most of it is it hitting the server trying to get the icons for all the files (ALL the files), and there is no way to turn off custom icon view. We are using AppleTalk, and I have heard SMB is a marked improvement, not because it's the fault od appletalk, but the waty X handles appletalk.
Also USB sucks too, you can't boot from a USB CD in 10, (9 is no problem, speed is not that bad in 9, but really lame in 10). (I suspect it has to dso with the overhead 10 has in device dection on the USB.) Maybe it's all thier legacy interfaces (ATA and USB) that are speed dogs.
Apple has a bit of work on improving some of these OS X core components to make me say it really rocks.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I'd imagine that if do a software RAID between an external FireWire drive and an external USB2.0 drive, you'd probably end up with the absolutely fastest disk performance the Mac Mini is ever likely to see... ...that would work, right?
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Apple's web page says they're "inexpansive but never cheap", even though they've used a 4200rpm wimp-sized drive - oh, well :-) If the cheap 40GB version isn't big enough for you, you're probably better off getting an external drive than upgrading to the cheap 80GB version, and if it doesn't perform well enough, add RAM, because 256MB isn't enough for everybody.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
not because of its appearance but because of the ability to run OS X on the cheap. The OS is the real gem, not the hardware (hardware is still very nice though). What would I do with the $500 PC? Use it as a door stop? I got all the Linux servers I need already. The CPU is a tad slow for Doom III or hard core video/audio editing, otherwise it's just dandy (typing this on a 867 MHz PowerBook). The mini is a well placed product I think although the hard drive does suck.
And this may be slightly offtopic, but considering the speeds we can get nowdays with Firewire 800, for either Mac or PC, why go with expensive PATA/SATA when perhaps an internal firewire drive (replace the IDE bus, doubtful, but feasible if Firewire can get faster.) could do maybe NOT QUITE an equivalent job, but is cheap enough and fast enough for most day-to-day users?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If it makes you feel any better, I submitted a story about how Java 1.5 is out for OS X over two weeks ago, and it's still pending.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Slightly off topic..
Considering the subject matter and usual responses, thank you for the unusually on-topic and useful comments this round..
On some of the more interesting stories, I sometimes wish I could filter out the Funny and just stick to the Interesting and Insightful.
There's a reason the overall XBench score was only 15% up - latency. You can get good throughput with FW400, sure, but you may as well be going over ethernet with latency like that.
Fair comment. I have another equally subjective one:
Am I alone in getting the impression that some of Apple's products are falling down on their prior reputation for being of high quality? I'm not just referring to the matter referred to in the original post; a case in point is all those dodgy iPod batteries. And those two broken Combo drives I've got on a desk over there...
This isn't really news. Notebook drives are slow.
The nice thing is that the firewire bus can technically handle 400 megabit sustained throughput, so you can chain together four firewire/ATA devices and use them all without any serious bottlnecking (beyond the system bus, but hey).
The next one bigger has always come to me as a result of warranty repair. This said just because you should send back your broken drive, you'll probably get a better one in return. My analysis of hard drives in general tells me to pick segate or WD. In 2.5in drives I dont see how the situation would be different but when you're thinking about heat and noise... you'll want a quality drive that avoids these. You'll want a segate or wd.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC.
:)
You must have a lot of skeletons in your closet
You can get an EIDE/SATA 400GB drive for about $250 now, and the 400GB version of this thing is $560.
$310 is a lot to pay for a drive enclosure and a port hub, even if it does look like the macMini. By the time you've purchased the mini itself, this thing, and assuming you're using it stand-alone - a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.. you might as well buy a BigMac and get a faster + more expandable system.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
couldnt you just get a 7200rpm 2.5inch drive to replace the 4200rpm one in there?
I could be wrong - maybe you're referring to something else - but:
Finder -> View -> Show View Options (Cmd-J)
Uncheck "Show icon preview."
The space unintentionally left unblank.
True. My guess is that Apple figured the low cost of the Mac mini would bring out exactly this sort of experimentation. That's one of the big things they were looking for from the mini, as one route to growing marketshare is to grow geek mindshare first. To me it's somewhat analagous to the Honda Civic. For a long time Honda pretty much ignored the fact that tens of thousands of enthusiasts were tricking out their Civics, putting all kinds of time and money into cars that were purchased inexpensively. After a while, Honda embraced this and came out with the Civic Nation TV ad.
I'm not saying that taking cheap PCs and adding all kinds of capabilities to them is anything new. Apple isn't exactly going where no one has gone before here. But I wouldn't be suprised if the accessorizing we've seen with the iPod starts hitting overdrive with the Mac mini before long. For every one geek who wants to get into the innards of the computer, there are another nine who want to add capabilities without having to learn much about the inner workings.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
But still, I'd hold out for a Tiger QE-capable mini.. Something with the 9600/9700 chipset is appropriate for that price point in this day and age..
Then again, I just got this phat new Athlon rig and I'll copy my dead old laptop's drive onto my gentoo with a 2.5" firewire enclosure.. Too bad Apple really sucked eggs on that PowerMac update!
I bought a HD Firewire enclosure from TigerDirect for use with my Mac Mini and Tiger OS (but not for the reasons outlined in TFA). Just thought that was a bit ironic considering the legal entanglements...
I replaced the stock drive in my 17" RevA powerbook with the 7200rpm 60gb Hitachi.
No change in noise, heat or battery drain.
The performance gain is notcieable and very welcome.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
This reminds me of our old mac plus. We had an external HDD. It was called a "Quark" I think and it was about as big as a decent sized VCR.
It's was 10 megabytes if I remember correctly. And you could boot off of it! (If you used the Quark Loader boot disk).
Then we got a 386 with a 40meg hard drive INSIDE IT (wow).
First of all, let's recap. When Apple introduced the G5 two years ago, you may remember the ads which proclaimed "The World's First 64-bit Personal Computer." What they forgot to mention was a pretty fundamental flaw with their claim: their flagship OS X could not actually run any 64-bit applications!
It has taken two years and 2 OS releases for Apple to add limited support for 64-bit applications to OS-X. Even today, apps which utilize any graphical application framework libraries (i.e. any GUI application) cannot run in 64-bit mode. Apple actually expects software vendors to redesign their GUI apps to fork off 64-bit processes to perform any "compute-intensive" or "memory-intensive" work. Right! Nevertheless, I'm sure some vendors will do this work, no matter how silly.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
The point is this: for app vendors to port their apps to 64-bit Windows, very little work is required. In many cases, simply recompiling does the trick. In other cases, broken integer-pointer casts must be fixed, but little else. Certainly no redesign is required! To make this app transition so smooth required a large amount of work. Millions of lines of code making up the entire Windows codebase (not just the relatively small kernel) had to be made 64-bit clean. Additionally, it took lots of design thought to solve some of the tricky AppCompat issues to enable 32-bit and 64-bit apps to live side-by-side. You can read alot about how this works in Windows XP Pro x64 here.
Second of all, your claim that 64-bit Windows drivers are unavailable and unstable is complete balderdash. I would love to hear which currently-shipping 64-bit systems out there don't have available drivers (and I mean vendor-supplied systems here, not some homebrew with a random motherboard). I would also like to hear about ones that are buggy and unstable. MSN and several other top-tier internet sites have already switched to x64-based servers. From personal experience, I have 64-bit XP running on at least 4 different motherboard chipsets in 24/7 environments and I have yet to see a blue screen on any of them. All with inbox drivers: I didn't lift a finger.
Granted, vendor-supplied drivers for peripherals which don't work with class drivers is currently limited on Windows x64, as happens whenever a new version of Windows comes out that requires driver changes (remember Win2k?). But it's extremely ironic to hear Apple people use the term "limited" in reference to hardware support, even referring to Windows x64. I'd bet that inbox device support for x64 is greater than the totality of device support for OSX Tiger. And as for peripherals, most USB and Firewire devices will work fine, because they utilize class drivers which Microsoft owns and therefore ports itself.
Yes, you can bet that Apple is embarrassed by its lack of 64-bit application support even with its latest Tiger release. But Apple has done a masterful job of sweeping that lack of support under the carpet with fantastic marketing. I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it. I actually feel kind of bad for them: I'm sure they felt a bit miffed that their promised "World's First 64-bit Personal Computer" was not actually a useful 64-bit system. I know I would be.
I have an old Shuttle at home, acting as a server, running Fedora Core 2. Everything works fine, but it has only a singe IDE disk. In order to get some redundacy (and additional storage) I bought two 200GB drives and an external firewire enclosure. (The shuttle has firewire 400 ports)
When I hooked it up, the 2.6.10-1.771_FC2 wouldn't recognize the new disks. Apparently Firewire support in 2.6.x is not that god yet -- even 2.4.x is better.
I haven't spent the time to research much more. Does any of you slashdotters have better experiences with firewire storage under linux 2.6.x ??
Part of it might be that badly written apps, and badly written web pages, assume that 1px has a given physical size. This assumption is broken with very high resolution screens, causing things to be too small and unusable.
Common culprits are the `px' CSS measure used for font size. Another big one is apps that do all their layout in px with an assumed font and size, so that their layout breaks horribly if you up the font size - which you have to do to make it readable on your screen.
Personally, I'm working quite happily on a 120dpi display, but then I'm using a suitable OS and set of apps to handle it.
Having messed around with RAID on the Mac, I don't think striping/RAID is worthwhile on Firewire 400. FW400 maxes out at around 30MB/s, which is easily acheivable using a modern hard drive.
Using FW800, I'm getting sustained read and write of around 50MB/s using single Seagate 7200.8 drives. To make a really good RAID stripe, you really need multiple FW800 channels, one for each disk.
there is no such thing as 4500rpm
there are these following speeds:
4200
5400
7200
10000
15000
now, there were the quantum bigfoot 5.25 drives that came in 3600 & 4000; but most hard drives made since 1999 follow the above mantra
FireWire target disk mode also allows the CD or DVD drive to be visible to the firewire channel. So if you've got a PowerBook with a DVD drive, you can turn it into a very large external DVD drive, which might be useful if you are upgrading CD-only iMacs or Cubes.
..considering the MacMini uses a 2.5" laptop HD - I've got doubts about using such a device 24/7 as my normal desktops operate. and performance of such devices is way behind the curve of 3.5" HD's - eg the fluid bearing 80-250Gb Seagate Barracuda IV range with 2MB of cache. they could have used a 3.5" drive if the MacMini were just a little bit bigger. Typical Apple though. never makes the best product available for the customer...always some shortcoming so you buy the next model when its released. ah well. I can see plenty of people buying a specially designed module which sits underneath and compliments the Mac Mini (think GBA game player for GameCube)
I managed to get doom3 running on my mini, even though it was below the minimum spec. Granted it suffered from extreme slowdown in places, but I did manage to complete the game.
At least this (even the bit about Safari feeling faster due to caching) sounds more plausible than a Pentium making teh intarweb go faster :-)
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
My care scale goes to -11
"You have liberated me from thought."
just buy a REAL computer in the FIRST PLACE.
My favorite part of his entire review:
;-)
Benchmarks are boring! Because benchmarks are boring, I'll skip to the conclusion, and follow up with the process and gory details afterwards.
Glad to see that there is definately a significant performance increase in using a firewire disk, however that does kinda say something about the low-cost turtle hard drive Apple installs in its mini line to lower its price.
I think the Mac mini is a great idea, but the machine is still in its infancy to be honest. Needless to say, I would still recommend that all of you go out an buy one so that economies of scale could kick in to lower costs for superior components so that *I* may eventually buy one
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
I purchased my Mini to support creating dual format disks with data created on my Windows systems. I found to my great pleasure that I can use my firewire 40 and 160GB external drives to transfer data quickly between systems. This article prompts me to try a faster 300GB firewire drive to let me start editing video on the Mini.
I ran each benchmark a couple times until the results became fairy consistent between runs. The first run on each drive was noticeably different than the following ones, what I am publishing here is from one of the later runs.
He should have done a fresh boot before each run, I think, to make sure the unified buffer cache didn't hide some of the performance differences... especially if he had 512M or more of RAM in the mini. What does XBench do to compensate for caching?
What enclosure would people suggest for a DVD. I'm siding with Firewire because of lower CPU usage but the USB 2.0 ones are much easier to find. Suprisingly, there usually isn't much cost difference.
There seems to be really good reviews of the Oxford 911 chipset but they're hard to find in Canada, IMO.
Any suggestions?
Most Mac users don't seem to distinguish between Appletalk and Appleshare unless they're complaining that Tiger doesn't support Appletalk and their old OS 9 file servers aren't up to doing Appleshare. :)
Mmmmm... This really makes me feel a little better about bashing Apple hardware. At least Microsoft doesn't have your testicles in a lime squeezer when it comes to hardware selection. Oh, and I REALLY dislike Microsoft, if only because I fix computers for a living.
Kids, just because Microsoft is a whole lot worse than Apple doesn't mean Apple doesn't suck it hard.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The real crime here is that Apple would have even shipped a computer with a 4200rpm drive.
That's not a crime, but it is possibly excessively conservative design. The Mac mini is a bit of a thermal challenge as it is, and there's a lot of places they've really shortchanged performance to make it run on less power and thus need less cooling. I'm sure that's why the USB ports can't deliver full power, for example... the external powered hub I used gets noticably warmer when I have a pocket hard disk hooked up to it. It's possibly even why they went with the Radeon 9200, because the 9600SE isn't that much more expensive (and would have supported QE2d, dagnabbit).
Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console
We don't know anything about the Xbox CPU other than it's got 3 "G5" cores and it runs at 3.2 GHz. We do know that the "Cell" computer in the Playstation 3 will use a "G5" core, but we know a few other things about it that make it less exciting as a general purpose computer - it's got no L2 cache, for one thing - so you can't assume that the processor in the Xbox is similar to what Apple would need for a 3 GHz Powermac G5.
Remember, Apple's getting CPUs from IBM as well, and it's the speed of those CPUs that have been holding them back.
Most car guys realize that a motor swap is the best way to make signifigant power gains in most vehicles. We've had this concept for decades...it's called buying a new motherboard.
Blar.
Apple makes overpriced widgets that look pretty and sell to the artist mentality. There are small slick PCs that have just as much power for the same or less money. However, Apple's mindshare would preclude any of the Mac or should I say Bicycle faithful from considering them.
This guy takes an old IDE hard drive from an old PC and hooks it up with Firewire to his Mac mini and that's innovative and a "challenge"? Wow, My common sense tells me that since I can build a sub-$500 PC myself, inside a nice enclosure of my choosing without loud fans and a slow 2.5" laptop hard drive then that would be a real challenge.
Connecting an external peripheral isn't a challenge it's something average PC users do every day. Come on all I'm read on this thread is cogent arguments for why this isn't news and why mini users have their heads in the ground or is that clouds?
I can't see one reason to own a $500 slow computer because it's pretty when you can build at $500 computer that's fast and pretty. It's the typically Mac same limited internal expansion problems as all Macintosh models since they killed cloning as far as I'm concerned. Try using a Mac G5 for NLE and see how fast you run out of PCI slots.
Of course since this is a cult of personality, no Apple faithful reading this thread will learn anything from any of what is said here. There is always a reason to keep the faith. More power to you, I wish I still had allegiance to a single source vendor like Apple, Amiga is Dead/Long Live the King, but with the 1000s of PC hardware vendors out there what's the point of paying too much for less power? Oh, wait I remember the mantras - Macs are better for graphics, Macs are easier to use and my favorite Macs don't crash. (All of which are not absolute truths. I've seen low end PCs run circles around Macs with cheap 8X 3D Accelerators running the same graphics applications, I've seen new users struggle just as much with the Mac GUI as with the Windows GUI or any other OS for that matter and cover your ears MacHeads - I've even seen Mac OS X 10.3 crash many times.)
Ignorant FLAME WAR to follow.....
Behold the beautiful. External storage as pretty as your mac and at a price mac users can obviously afford.
Example 2
Example 3
(Though I don't remember posting this one...)
Mike
It would be better to say:
"as a preinstalled part of the OSX bloat"
BACKGROUND :-)
t icles/mini/
t icles/mini/dock/
l e+IDC+2.5%22+IDE+Laptop+Gender+Changer
:-( But here is the plan:
I bought my mini for the software. Years ago I paid for a miniDV camcorder, because I knew that someday I would be able to afford a computer to edit the footage with. That day finally came!
But the HDD stinks. External SATA is possible, and the best answer. Here's why...
OPTIONS
FW 400
While I *might* go for an external FW 400 solution, the mini only has one FW port... and copying DV material from a camcorder to a FW HDD on the same channel is a no-no.
USB 2.0
slower than FW 400 on the mini, according to what I've read. But more importantly, the mini won't boot from USB.
External 3.5" PATA
Ah, now we're talking! Check out these articles: 4 sweet solutions, all of which allow use of 3.5" HDDs on the mini's own ATA/100 controller:
mini in a PC box
http://www.appletalk.com.au/articles/miniserver/
mini with an external drive box housing an ATA HDD
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
mini ensconsed in a Centris 660
(Check out the XBench scores table)
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/ar
And best of all (IMHO), the purple mini
http://macmod.com/content/view/273/2/
External 3.5" SATA
The problem with the external PATA solutions is that the form factor sucks. Which got me thinking: If I could only use one of those fancy new SATA cables...
PARTS LIST
1. PATA to SATA bridgeboard:
http://www.google.com/search?q=PATA2SATA
2. IDE Hard Drive Cable Adapter - 2.5'' to 3.5''
http://www.google.com/search?q=StarTech+IDE4044
3. 44 Pin Male to Male IDC 2.5" IDE Laptop Gender Changer
http://www.google.com/search?q=+44+Pin+Male+to+Ma
DETAILS
I don't yet have the money to do this project, or you would have already heard the results.
Assemble the three components together (and trim off the unneeded power connection from the 2.5" to 3.5" cable adapter). You now have an assembly that fits within the space normally occupied by the mini's 2.5" HDD.
WARNING: the real unknown is whether or not you can actually then snake an SATA cable from the bridge board and out the back (or side) of the mini. But I think it will work. Assuming it does...
RESULTS
There are more and more SATA drive enclosures hitting the market. This year the trend is multiplexing backplanes, so that you can RAID multiple SATA drives in the enclosure and connect them via one channe back to the computer.
Pick an attractive SATA drive enclosure, plug it in, connect it to the mini, and off you go!
Phil Lawrence
--
feel free to email me if you'd like details about the success or failure of the project, once I get the parts together
Hitachi has a 7200RPM 9.5MM 60GB hard drive for laptops. Thus far it is he fastest laptop hard drive until Seagate releases their new line of momentus drives. I've noticed a 50% increase in performance over other drives. Also, the hitachi disk utility lets you change power management settings as well as accoustic settings. Unfortunately, these can only be accessed on a PC.
Apple has stated that the reason their laptops remain at the resolution they do is so that they maintain a 100dpi resolution. So it is intentional. You can disagree with that if you like -- not many people need to run 15" screens at super-high resolutions, as they can often make text difficult to read.
No they don't. They make unscaled text difficult to read, but Apple has one of the best scalable text systems on the planet right now... so going from 100dpi to 120dpi means either 20% smaller text or 20% better quality text at small text sizes... which means your text is actually EASIER to read.
Apple has the best scalable text on the planet right now. In fact it's hard to really take advantage of it because you have to turn antialiasing off when you get down below about 10px, but if the screen was 120dpi you'd get 20%
Just be careful...
If you've got an occasionally vindictive ex-spouse, he/she may call your purchase of a Mac mini a "luxury purchase", as mine did.
Apparently she failed to realize that it was a Mac mini. A Power Mac G5 tower with dual 2.7 GHz processors and a 30" Apple Cinema Display would have been a "luxury purchase". A 1.67 GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with all the goods would have been a "luxury purchase".
A Mac mini with 512 MB or RAM and nothing wireless is so not a "luxury purchase".
Be warned...
-- haaz.
The term "bloat" makes sense when you're talking about individual applications. You don't have to run Disk Utility and eat up system resources to use non-Disk Utility aspects of the OS, so it isn't "bloat."
I've been using a real 64-bit OS for over 10 years now, using a true 64-bit API, and all I can say about this issue is:
1. If you really need 64-bit, you know it.
If you just think 64-bit is all about speed, you're confused... the reason the 64-bit Alpha was fast and stayed at the front of the pack with far less effort than Intel had to go through (at least until it got Compaqted) was less the fact that it was 64-bit (in fact programs in 32-bit mode were often faster) than the fact that DEC was able to start with a clean slate and design a good fast CPU architecture without having loads of backwards compatibility to worry about.
The reason AMD's 64-bit stuff is fast is the same, they're able to shed a lot of the IA32 cruft and add a lot more register file space.
And that's why 64-bit Power PC doesn't give you the same boost, because it's already a pretty good CPU architecture, it doesn't have a need for a massive overhaul.
So unless you REALLY need 64 bit, and if you do you already know you need it and you know why you need it and you're not whinging about whether Apple's 64-bit is "real" or not because you're already using it, it doesn't matter if your 64-bit is real or not, because you don't need it and won't use it even if you have it.
2. If you think Windows is "real" 64-bit, think again.
Even the latest 64-bit Windows isn't using a pure 64-bit model, even in 64-bit mode. DEC went with a full 64-bit model that matched the native Alpha 64-bit register set, and most of the other UNIX systems went with 64-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, but Windows uses 32-bit longs and 64-bit pointers, and you need a special "long long" data type to do pointer and offset arithmetic. So, using code that actually addresses more than 4G of RAM on Windows is going to remain tricky for a while.
Apple uses the intermediate model, with 64-bit pointers, and both 64 and 32-bit integers (int and long). This requires a little more complexity than the Alpha 64-bit model, but it lets 64-bit programs that people are already using work without change. So while you can't call the 32-bit GUI libraries from 64-bit mode, most 64-bit code is server software or command-line batch applications that don't make GUI calls at all... and that'll just work on Tiger.
I know many G5 owners who had no clue until I told them that their G5 actually could not run 64-bit applications because OS-X did not support it.
The fact that they had no clue means they didn't need it, and the only advantage of the 64-bit hardware for them (like for virtually everyone else in the entire world, except for people who already knew about it because anyone who really needed it was on top of that kind of detail) was that it let them use more than 4G of physical RAM. shared among all their (32-bit and WAY less than 4G long) apps.
And from the very first the Powermac G5 supported up to 8G.
So for the only purpose that mattered to them, they already had a useful 64-bit system.
The people who ought to feel miffed are the ones who've already been using ILP64 or LP64 code for years, who will have to port it to the IL32P64 Windows mess.
Well-implemented firewire devices are, in general, noticeably faster than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices are, in general, slower than well-implemented USB2 devices.
Poorly-implemented firewire devices and poorly-implemented USB2 devices vary so much that no real comparison is possible.
You had better evaluate your specific devices before you say that one spec is faster than another, because there are an AWFUL LOT of lousy firewire cases out there.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Heres a link to my MAXImini. I use my mini as a PVR (ElGato USB EyeTV and Kensington media remote (etc.)... http://web.aanet.com.au/tardis/j/photopages/minimo ney/minimoney.html
I always planned on upgunning drive performance so I built a 1.2TB homemade firewire soft-RAID array.
http://web.aanet.com.au/tardis/j/photopages/Maximi ni/Maximini.html
turned out to be $1AUS per GB :)
In my world though, moving our servers to the 64bit version of Windows took our server requirments to less than 1/5 the equivalent systems when running the 32bit version of Windows 2003 Server.
So maybe that fuzzy math stuff does work in the real world.
So you're comparing two completely different architectures, one of which was register starved until the move to 64bit, and the other which had no such problems, and claiming that moving to a fully 64bit architecture made a difference for one, so it must for the other?
Do some reading about the difference before you start spouting off.
In my world though, moving our servers to the 64bit version of Windows took our server requirments to less than 1/5 the equivalent systems when running the 32bit version of Windows 2003 Server.
And this was because:
1. You redesigned all your services to use 64-bit large-address space code where you had previously been using read/write to access a large disk-based object through a 2G "windows".
2. Newer computers are generally faster than old ones, and Opteron's instruction set is faster than IA32 because of the slightly cleaner ABI and the larger register file.
3. You're running Oracle, and Oracle through utterly heroic measures has managed to take advantage of the "32-bit-segmented" mode of the Xeon to get option 1 working, so your speedup is a special case that most people can't take advantage of.
4. You don't know, and you don't care.
5. Something I haven't thought of.
What's so hard to understand... It gives you an increase in performance, but it makes your [b]mini[/b], well, [b]bigger[/b]! Why can't you just get a proper computer if you need performance? Space not an issue? Then why get a mini?
This is as exciting as running linux on an ipod..
Must-not-watch TV!
Ok, so XBOX has veery few upgrade options. It's par for the course when one speaks of video game consoles. I was talking about home and business PCs.
And I fix computers for a living, which means I troubleshoot and repair computers. Which includes software. Have you ever used MS Activesync? It doesn't fuxking work with MS Outlook. Have you noticed how Microsoft software is incompatible with other Microsoft software?
I actually hate MS for quite a few more reasons than just the fact that I fix computers, now that I think about it. Thanks for providing perspective.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
um, i don't know a lot about firewire (and/or USB for that matter), but my guess would be that you don't get DMA like you do with the drive connected directly to an ATA port.
my guess is that they get faster performance, but the cpu overhead is greater, leaving less time for processes to run while i/o is going on.
The fact that 64-bit Windows compilers by default use a 32-bit long data type has nothing to do with whether Windows is a complete 64-bit platform. You can change that behavior with a simple compiler switch: whoila! 64-bit longs! Modern programmers don't leave the size of their critical integers up to chance, and use the int64 data type when required, precisely because you can't tell when coding what the executing platform will choose for the size of your ints.
Ugh! PLEASE don't tell me you are one of those programmers who writes code that assumes integers and pointers are interchangeable! That is a VERY BAD programming practice. It is not guaranteed that int and int* are the same length by the C or C++ standards. If you need to be able to cast between the two, then you need to make sure your integer type is the same length as pointers on the underlying platform. It's a very simple concept.
I wish they'd start shipping lower end systems with serial ATA ports. Then we'd see some real speed gains.