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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."

6 of 533 comments (clear)

  1. And if you want something really cool by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:And if you want something really cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.
    2. Re:And if you want something really cool by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:And if you want something really cool by itistoday · · Score: 5, Informative

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

      --
      Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
  2. ask and you are answered... by mbaudis · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. this is not NEW news. check bareFeats.com by henk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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