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FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance

Posted by timothy on from the outside-in dept.

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."

7 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And if you want something really cool by value_added · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... relatively poor ... way more huge ... way too ugly"

    A thoughtful analysis if ever I read one.

  2. This just in.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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".

  3. Re:And if you want something really cool by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?

    1 macMini: $500
    2 400GB external drives: $1000
    Spending $1500 to run RAID on an entry-level machine: priceless.
    --
    "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  4. My similar story was rejected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. Re:I have nothing to do with that product... by TerranFury · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  6. Re:And if you want something really cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:About time... by Frogbert · · Score: 4, Funny
    This guy isn't a troll. This is an old joke that was thrown around Mac newsgroups, as far as I know it was a real post originally.
    don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac
    fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (
    a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) 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, Netscape will not work. And
    everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite 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 various Macs, but suffice it to say there
    have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has
    run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' 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 Macintosh is a superior machine.

    Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some
    intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other
    faster, cheaper, more stable systems.


    Here is a slashdot counterpart:
    I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you
    Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front
    of a Slashdot screen for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy
    a 17 line troll from one message thread on the hard drive to another
    thread. 20 minutes. At home, on my Kur05hin account, which by all
    standards should be a lot slower than this Slashdot, the same operation
    would take about 2 minutes. If that.

    In addition, during this troll transfer, Netscape will not work. And
    everything else has ground to a halt. Even fuckedcompany.net 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 various Slashdots, but suffice it to say
    there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a
    Slashdot that has run faster than its Kuro5hin
    counterpart, despite the Slashdot's faster troll architecture. my.yahoo.
    com with 8 categories of Rueters Top News runs faster than this site at
    times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim
    that Slashdot is a superior forum.
    Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some
    intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over other
    faster, cheaper, more stable forums.