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."

Comments

And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

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

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

snip
The internal drive is slow cause it is a cheap/low end drive. A decent 7200 rpm notebook drive as a replacement will greatly improve the performance of a mini. (And the run cooler) Just upgrade the internal drive (yes, many people have done this) and you dont need an ugly extra external drive or even a pretty one that takes up more space.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

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

Absolutely.

With Disk Utility, it's just a matter of dragging the disks into a RAID set, and you're done.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[itistoday]

*ahem* For those not aware Disk Utility is a free hard disk utility that comes with every mac, and every OS X installation.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[steve_bryan]

Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.

My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.

So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.

Yes

[peterdaly]

Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.

Been using a USB 2.0 Drive....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

ask and you are answered...

[mbaudis]

here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html

this is not NEW news. check bareFeats.com

[henk]

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

Re:Size/Price/Performance - 3.5" always beats 2.5"

[evilviper]

Firewire shoeboxes are usually a bit more expensive than USB2, but I don't know if Apple's USB2 drivers are as fast as their firewire drivers, so check it out if it matters to you.

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.