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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."
... relatively poor ... way more huge ... way too ugly"
A thoughtful analysis if ever I read one.
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.
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".
Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Think of it as male contraception.
Don't worry; I'm not so paranoid to think that you're involved in an elaborate conspiracy to sell a hard drive enclosure! Any true conspiracy theorist can tell you that you'd need at least a black helicopter or two for that...
Perhaps, so as to avoid future misunderstandings, the two of us can start a conspiracy to get the W3C to add a <joke> tag to the next draft of HTML...
This is like putting an after market "cherry bomb" muffler on a Toyota Prius.
Not terribly clever are we?
Lets make it a diagram.
Care scale
==========
- -- Care a great deal
|
|
|
|
- -- Don't care at all
In order for the phrase 'I could not care less' to be true, it must not be possible to move any further down the above scale.
Thus, you must be at the bottom.
Yeah thats nifty and all, but can you also format a floppy at the same time? Didn't think so.
If you're not willing to pay extra just for looks, why did you buy a Mac to begin with?
I'll take your word for it, because I haven't the vaguest idea how to measure the performance of an ovvice machine.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yeah, but it doesn't have as much space as the Nomad, and it doesn't have wireless! That's just lame!
Oh, wait, I guess you can get the Airport card as an option...
oops nix that, I read your "1, 2" as bullet points, not quantities. Must wake up...
No matter how fast a computer people here have, many of them will want to tinker with thier computers to make them faster. Like people who soup up cars.
If by "people who soup up cars" you mean "ricers", then yes.
OMG ROFLMAO KIKI I just overclocked my AMD K400 to 12 Parsecs!1!!!! Zerg Rush!