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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."
You buy a system with a 4500 RPM drive, and you're surprised that an external FW 5400 or 7200 RPM drive performs better? Furrfu ...
Next on slashdot: a new and exciting way to suck eggs.
If you're in the crowd that would be bothered by a slow HDD, then I'd expect you to understand the implications of the mini's specs. I'm aware of this, yet bought a mini anyway, and it's chugging along fine for my needs, without any external storage.
Have you seen the inside of the Mac mini?
It's completely full. There is no more room, and, if space were no issue, Apple would most certainly have used a 3.5" drive, if only for reasons of specifications (larger drive for the money) and cost.
Am I the only one here to suggest that changing the drive to a 5400 RPM 2.5in drive or even 7200 RPM 2.5in drive would improve the performance AND preserve the good looks ?
It seems that to make the mini even worth using is to spend lots of money on upgrades.
/. 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.
No, this is not true. Remember you are at
The tinkering is fun.
The Mac mini is a fantastic little machine. I have an AMD XP2800+ with 2 7200 RPM drives and 2GB of DDR RAM, but I mostly use my little Mac mini because of Mac OS X. A faster computer is always nicer, but part of the minis appeal is its size and price. It runs OS X nicely given this in mind.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
You mean couldn't care less (because you don't care at all).
Your post was informative, but it's hard to concentrate on your message when you present it through these annoying grammatical oddities.
Even if you did, I don't see how that would be a bad thing. What is wrong with placing an advertisement here, where it is safe to say most/all readers would be interested in it. Certainly it is beneficial to the readers to have this information here, and also to the business to have the readers see that information. It's a win-win situation.
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently. Most of them involve either major, warranty-voiding modifications to the chassis, or as is the case here, ugly external peripherals that negate the main attraction of the Mini, its external appearance.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs. It has one DIMM slot, a relatively slow CPU, and a notebook hard drive -- if thats not what you want, you should look for something else rather than expecting the rest of the world to salute your cleverness in partially addressing its shortcomings. If you don't really need a Mac, you can put together a PC for under $500 with a real hard drive and much better expandability. If you want a $500 computer to run OS X on, you can get a used G4 with specifications similar to a Mini, except again with useful internal expansion capacity. And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The real crime here is that Apple would have even shipped a computer with a 4200rpm drive.
:)
Yes I understand the slight cost difference and the slight possibility of heat difference, but a 4200rpm Drive? Give me a Break; it is almost 3 generations old in technology.
It is hard to even buy a laptop drive that is not at least 5400rpm anymore, and the 7200rpm and upcoming 10000rpm drives equal desktop hard drive performance.
They saved what, maybe $10-25 on the computer by using the 4200rpm drive, and yet I would imagine almost every user would rather pay the extra money to have a computer with a hard drive with 'normal' performance.
How is this innovative or cutting edge, when the technology they are shoving at Mac users, and first time Mac buyers that are not technical was top of line 5 years ago?
Apple can do SO much better than this, and we need to remind Apple that if they want to be the innovators and 'technology' leaders they can't get away with giving people sub quality performance and outdated technology.
I know a lot of people here love Apple and their Macs, but there are times when you need to tell Apple what you think and PUSH them to DO the right things and PUSH them to provide truly the best technology they can.
(In. example, you still can't buy a Mac Laptop with a high resolution LCD Screen, you still can't buy a Mac with graphics that are even in same class as top of the line PC graphics cards, The G5 is a great CPU, but even OSX (yes even Tiger) does not fully even utilize the features of this CPU. Tiger isn't' even a real 64bit OS, and should be (apple controls all the hardware, this should be easier for them than Microsoft and yet Microsoft is the one with a real 64bit OS for consumers. There are numerous other issues that truly bother me when people tell me they are the 'technology leader when it comes to graphic design or imaging' - technically the hardware falls short of what is available to the PC world.
One other note on the G5, if Microsoft can take a tri-core G5 based CPU and put it a Video Game Console (Xbox360) at 3+GHz, why can't Apple do this in a desktop system and be a technology leader?
Ironic that the hard hitting G5 based Tri-core CPU from IBM is running Windows NT and Direct X for gaming and will be sold for playing Games.
Ok, I got off a bit on an Apple Rant, but darn it I used to love Apple back in the late 80s, and they keep disappointing me and disappointing me. I had so hoped OSX would be the saving factor for what I had expected from Apple, yet it is still catching up to Microsoft and Open Source OSes in a lot of ways and Apple still is NOT providing the cutting edge hardware that they 'market' that they are.
Apple fans, don't just accept what Apple gives you is always great, question it, compare it to the PC world, and if it isn't truly the level you expect from Apple, TELL THEM. Maybe some good user feedback will push Apple a bit more.
Take Care all... and sorry about the long rant.
Spend the extra money on RAM instead, the cacheing will more then fix the drive RPM issue.
;)
Like any computer, once you run the apps once, they load near instantly.
And if you're doing heavy file serving, well... that's not what a mini is for now is it
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
That's probably why laptop manufacturers simply don't "make the laptops a little thicker" to accomodate larger drives.
I just think that Apple's point with the mini isn't to create a cheap computer for everyone, including the geeks who like to put together power machines for super-cheap. Rather, for the people who just want a computer to do computery "stuff." To them, they likely won't notice a difference for the harddrive, and they'll probably feel that the computer is faster overall compared to their older windows machine. sure, that's because the windows machine is infested with so much virus and spyware because they never run scans nor updates, but those people still buy and use computers.
Fair comment. I have another equally subjective one:
Am I alone in getting the impression that some of Apple's products are falling down on their prior reputation for being of high quality? I'm not just referring to the matter referred to in the original post; a case in point is all those dodgy iPod batteries. And those two broken Combo drives I've got on a desk over there...
Apple doesn't make commodity hardware, and they never have. Even though this system falls into the 'commodity' price range (and barely, at that) that doesn't make it a commodity box. You're paying for the engineering it took to stick all that shit into a tiny, silent enclosure.
If you want power, buy power. If you want cheap, buy cheap. But understand - Apple doesn't make cheap, and they never have. You can always build something yourself if you want a good mix of powerful and cheap - but good luck shoving that into an enclosure that even resembles the Mini.
And good luck running OS X on it.
Culture is more than commerce
In addition to idiotic things like never remembering how I left my windows - which is mainly GUI related stupidity - the OS X Finder still suffers from the problem of completely hanging when you lose access to a mounted remote file server. This was annoying in the OS 9 days, but is completely inexcusable when you're running on a fully mutlithreaded, multiuser core. There is no longer a technical reason for this - it's just that nobody at Apple has bothered to spend any resources on the fixing Finder.
Pity, too, considering that the Finder is the most used application on any Mac system. Idiots.
Culture is more than commerce
" built-in FireWire controller is more likely to support this than a PCI card."
That kind of guesswork is exactly why Apple is still in business.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If only there was a non-Windows OS that one could install on such "large/ugly/beige/boring generic PC" type systems. A UNIX-like OS would be best, I think.
Ah, but alas, nobody has made such a program, or you wouldn't have assumed the systems were running Windows simply on their PC hardware.
Part of it might be that badly written apps, and badly written web pages, assume that 1px has a given physical size. This assumption is broken with very high resolution screens, causing things to be too small and unusable.
Common culprits are the `px' CSS measure used for font size. Another big one is apps that do all their layout in px with an assumed font and size, so that their layout breaks horribly if you up the font size - which you have to do to make it readable on your screen.
Personally, I'm working quite happily on a 120dpi display, but then I'm using a suitable OS and set of apps to handle it.
But size isn't just about functionality. Size is very important for some people for reasons beyond size. Do you think laptops are made small for "style"? Of course not - they are made small, because smallness is a feature.
... and then they built the supercollider.
You really need to get your PC fixed. Seriously - all those crashes and reboots you talk about are not normal. I can run Azerus, firefox, burn a dvd and whatever else with no problems.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"