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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
...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
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
here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html
Yes, lots. I've had a 60GB 7200 2.5" laptop drive for a few years now. Hitachi just came out with a 7200 RPM 100 GB drive.
The process (from TFA):
1. Install the IDE drive into the FireWire Enclosure. In addition to opening the enclosure and putting it back together, this will probably involve plugging in two cables (power and IDE) into the drive and possibly (depending on the design) screwing in 4 screws.
2. Plug the enclosure into the Mac Mini using a FireWire cable and power.
3. Format/Erase the drive using Apple's Disk Utility...OSX may prompt you depending on how the drive setup. (You'll lose any data on the drive during this step.)
4. Clone the internal disk to the FireWire Drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)
5. Change the Startup Disk using the System Preferences Startup Disk control panel
6. Reboot
7. Make sure everything went well, do some testing to make sure everything is working and all your data is on the new drive.
8. Erase your internal drive to avoid confusion of duplicate files.
Either that, or he's just trying get you to mix up the steps and erase both your drives. ;)
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
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?
Hitachi makes a 7200RPM 2.5" IDE drive:
Hitachi 60GB TravelStar 7K60 7200RPM 8MB Cache.
Laptop resolution -- 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.
64 bit OSs -- It's more useful for consumers to introduce 64bit code for processes that can use it more effectively than simply dropping everything into it. Why? Mostly so that you can still use the operating system with the benefits of 64bit code without relying on getting all new programs. Most importantly, though, are drivers. Yes, Microsoft has released a 64bit version of Windows. As they release very little hardware on their own, though, you'd be hard pressed to get a system operational and crash-free on 64bit XP -- the drivers simply aren't there, and the ones that are tend to be buggy. Therefore it's smarter at this point to release an OS that can utilize 64bit elements if it finds it and scales back if they're not there, than simply dump a release out there with no real support so people don't go through the trouble of using it. As it is, it's more worthwhile for people with 64bit chips to continue running 32bit XP.
"triple core PPC chip" is in no way analogous to "triple core G4 or G5 chips." PPC is approprately compared to x86, not a specific model, so there's no reason to assume that the Xbox's CPU isn't the x86 equivalent of a 3 core celeron (or worse) at 3.2ghz, built in PPC architecture. Believe me, it's not because IBM suddenly had a breakthrough and could mass-produce triple-core G5s with no heating problems.
Tiger is not a full 64-bit OS because a full 64-bit OS would be slower and more resource-intensive in every way with no benefit. Let me repeat that, zero benefit. The only reason Windows gets away with it is because the x86-64 architecture includes improvements like additional general purpose registers (bringing the number from 4 to 16, half the number PowerPC has always had), not because 64-bitness really helps everything.
"And this may be slightly offtopic, but considering the speeds we can get nowdays with Firewire 800"
The Mac mini neither has FireWire 800, nor any extension means to add that.
"why go with expensive PATA/SATA"
Huh? PATA drives are the cheapest on the market, and SATA are hardly more expensive.
"perhaps an internal firewire drive"
FireWire drives don't exist, and FireWire isn't designed for internal use either. External FireWire enclosures for internal PATA or SATA drives, on the other hand, exist indeed.
Either way, this is moot, as the Mac mini *does* have both FireWire 400 and USB 2, but *doesn't* have FireWire 800, nor any space for 3.5 inch hard drives, nor any space to extend capabilities. It can only host a 2.5 inch drive inside, and all 2.5 inch drives are slower and more expensive than their 3.5 equivalents.
They are also, however, easier on power, quieter, and cooler. And, of course, smaller.
You can remotely wake up and boot a PC via PXE through the network and pull a new image. I'm sure any Mac can as well. I can only imagine the rig jobs you have going in your IT department if think booting and reimaging a PC/Mac from an iPod (or any portable drive for that matter) is a godsend. What were you doing before that was an option?
I don't know if the same thing is possible with USB and PCs
Yes it is and like above, PXE works as well, and the typical standard boot from cd or DVD too. If your image fits, you can have it on the DVD. If you are on a network, boot with a network boot disk, connect to a network share and pull a new image if PXE is not an option. Apple or PC, everyone of those options seems more logical then walking around with a portable drive visting and reimaging machines one by one.
I used my PowerBook's DVD drive to install Tiger onto my girlfriend's CD-only iBook. Very handy indeed.
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. -
So sorry -- I don't have a Mac Mini that I can provide some subjective data on. I do, however,
have a Mac Powerbook which I replaced the OEM drive in.
The OEM drive was a Fujitsu 5400 RPM 60 GB disk. I replaced it with a Hitachi 7200 RPM 60 GB disk. The replacement disk has the same/similar power saving features as the OEM, so the PBK firmware and the OS (10.3.9) have good control. I have experienced a noticable improvement in the speed of loading applications, as well as spooling large files to disk. (The Hitachi drive has a far larger onboard cache that helps a lot.) I have lost about 15 minutes worth of battery time when untethered from an AC mains source. Over all, excepting the high cost premium charged for the 7200 RPM drive, my upgrade has been a net plus.
Just my $00.02 worth...
Appletalk is a legacy technology that should only be used to talk to really old Macs and printers. If you can switch everything on your network to Appleshare over TCP, do so as soon as possible.
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
That may be true of the drives Apple is using, but it definately is not true of 2.5" drives. In fact, 2.5" drives are almost always going to be faster because of lower rotational mass, as well as other factors (caching on the drive, number of platters, etc.)
Right now my primary laptop drive is close to 40% faster than a brand-new Maxtor drive in a very fast server in the server room:
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.
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
Uhh, 480Mbps USB2.0 is slower than Firewire-400, period. No matter how wonderful the software/drivers, nothing can change that. Yes, I realize the numbers for USB2 are higher, but they are just marketing numbers, and reality is very different.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
One URL:
http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
No, Apple's moved from the $1500-$3500 range for computers down to $500-$2500 range. In order to keep profits up, costs have to be cut. In part, this is done through good design but more seems to be through commodity manufacturing, out-house. When you're having your stuff built on someone else's assembly line, it's hard to keep on top of quality control.
I drank what? -- Socrates