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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."
If I recall correctly, the drive inside the Mac Mini is a laptop (2.5") drive. Those aren't really known for great performance. I'd not be surprised if it's the same kind of drive they put in Powerbooks (a 4500RPM).
So... basically this article is saying that fast drives are faster than slow drives. Heck, if I want to do anything intensive on my Powerbook (like DV capture or heck, use GarageBand), I need to use an external firewire drive.
Maybe I should write an article about how my Powerbook is faster with a Firewire drive, too!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I wonder if people are making firewire cases that are the same dimensions as the Mac Mini, so you could stack them neatly. I think would be an obvious product, but I haven't seen any yet.
You might want to check out the MiniMate... (Also visible on engadget.)
I'll be flamed by die hard Mac zealots, but have to point that out: while the Mini is pretty unusable with 256MB under OSX it literally screams under Linux. ./configure time or video will get corrupt.
Debian installs just fine; some tweaking and a small patch may be needed to get X and audio to work properly (kernel 2.6.12 should already contain the audio patch) but after an evening you'll end up with a rock solid system that no Mini-Itx can match when it comes to price and power consumption.
Mine is a great cool and quiet DVD-DivX-Mp3-Photo player/viewer built on top of Debian Sid + gdm (for automatic login) + Ratpoison minimalistic WM + Freevo + Mplayer.
Getting Freevo to run was the hardest task since I had to tweak here and there and resolve manually some dependencies. Mplayer works like a charm, but if you compile it from source disable the (still buggy) Altivec optimization at